Firefox Usage Near 25% In Europe

A user writes "French researcher Xiti claims that Mozilla Firefox keeps winning terrain in Europe. 24.1% of Internet users in Europe use Firefox. Slovenia (44.5%), Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) lead the way, followed by a group of mostly Eastern European countries. Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%, right before Andorra. Oceania maintains a slight lead over Europe, at 24.8%; the rest of the world trails at 11.9% to 15.1%."

sounds way of low for home users

[dattaway]

I'm getting around 82% firefox, 16% IE.

OS platforms are 88% windows, 9% Mac, and nearly 3% Linux.

Are other people seeing this?

Linux came from Europe...

[feranick]

If you didn't notice...

The numbers for the Netherlands are not surprising

[name_of_feather]

Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%

I don't find that remarkable at all. I lived in the Netherlands for a few years, and one of the things that struck me was how Microsoft-centric the universities were. A huge percentage of the Computer Science students had never even tried an OS other than Windows! (I come from one of those sunny countries in the south of Europe, and that's where I attended university. There, the various flavours of Unix — mainly Linux of course — ruled and continue to rule inside the Computer Science department). Therefore it doesn't surprise me at all that the Dutch are still stuck in the yesteryear of Internet Explorer.

As time passed, I realised that part of the reason for the Dutch situation has to do with a certain spirit of conformity and of "trying not to distinguish yourself too much from your peers". Granted, it has its positive sides — like a fairly equalitarian society — but also downsides like this one.

Re:I must be ignorant

[stuartrobinson]

Oceania includes Micronesia (e.g., Guam), Melanesia (e.g., Papua New Guinea), Polynesia (e.g., Hawai'i), and Australasia (e.g., New Zealand). It's mostly made up of island nations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania [wikipedia.org]

Re:Linux came from Europe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Amsterdam. Before linux was minix, which was popular for teaching operating system fundamentals. Linus has stated that, had he known about *BSD, Linux wouldn't exist. Instead, his university taught minix, which was free but not Free, and didn't have full 386 support.

Re:Languages?

[sznupi]

Irrelevant - IE is also localised, so is Opera (BTW, alternative browsers combined for my place, Poland, are close to 50% now...)

Firefox 64% / IE 31%

[Eric Pierce]

Ok, absolutely shameless of me to post this here, but this site I maintain has Firefox at 64% (and IE at 31%). Nothing to do with Europe whatsoever. Sorry.
http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/website_stats.php [sourceforge.net]

Note: it's a total Windows power user app too. That partially explains it.

Eric

Because we are sick of msft's abusive practises

[walterbyrd]

We're sick of msft funding bogus lawsuits, lying to the US-DOJ, openly defying the EU, filing bogus patents, faking TCO studies, and faking benchmarks. We're sick of msft creating fake "think tanks" like AdTI, and using fake journalists like Enderle. We're sick of the astroturfing, and letters from dead people campaigns. We are not happy about msft stacking the deck with msft employees in the OOXML approval process.

Need I go on?

Re:Two important questions...

[Myen]

Umm, Firefox 3 will be using Cairo [cairographics.org], but I have no idea where the "fully based on Vectors" comes from. (Also, Firefox 1.5.x is Gecko 1.8.0; Firefox 2.x is Gecko 1.8.1)

If there's native support for OpenID, I haven't seen it yet :)

And in the improving-the-web direction, you basically want to look at WHATWG [whatwg.org] anyway - at least Mozilla, Opera, and Apple are behind it, so even if IE isn't there the other major desktop players are. And the new-ish HTML WG at W3C...

Re:W(here)tf

[Semptimilius]

Only Istanbul (Constantinople, Byzantium) is technically in continental Europe. The rest is in Asia.

Re:Useful for what?

[Alphager]

Well, I know Opera isn't, but aren't a bunch of other browsers based on the same engine as Firefox? Seamonkey/Mozilla, Konqueror, etc?

Seamonkey, Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Epiphany, Flock, Nautilus, K-Melon, Maxthon all use Gecko
Konqueror and Safari both use KHTML (although Apple has forked it and added some things KHTML still hasn't)

Re:Australia

[CoolMoDee]

Um. There is such a thing as Oceania, it covers New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and those pacific islands out there, Fiji etc. Or you know, I could have just imagined that entire portion of my geography exam...

Re:Yeah but...

[zurtle]

Nice map, as a Kiwi, I'm proud to be a Firefox user. I think it helps that a couple of Firefox developers were Kiwis too. Since then they've been snapped up by Google and are living the high life. New Zealand has a thriving technology sector and I think that has lead to New Zealanders being open to change more than most. While we're a dumping ground for old cellphones, we also trial a lot of cool stuff, like IP-based phone systems (courtesy of our Telecom and Alcatel). We've provided radio systems for the Soccer world cup (the last one and the next one), we are the source of high tech companies like Navman and Tait Electronics... and we even have the Macdiarmid institute that does some great research into nanotechnology.

Back ontopic... I recommend Firefox to anyone. My family all love the tabs especially when using the country's most favourite website TradeMe [trademe.co.nz]. However, I recently converted to Konqueror after acquiring an old, low spec iBook. Firefox is way too slow. I'm even considering ditching Thunderbird after a long devotion.

Re:Australia

[TempeTerra]

I live there you insensitive clod! There very much is such a place as Oceania, it's a name for the region including Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and a couple of dozen other island nations in the South Pacific. It is widely used and understood in the region. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Normally I wouldn't take exception to poor geographical knowledge (mine is far from perfect), but some clueless mods modded you up so I feel the need to respond.

Re:Australia

[mabinogi]

Australia is the name of the continent that most of The Commonwealth of Australia is on.

Australasia and Oceania are both pretty much equivalent loosely defined terms for the general regions of Australia, and New Zealand and the surrounding nations.
Australasia is probably a little more specifically Australia and New Zealand, but neither terms have official, standardised definitions as far as I can tell.

Even MS is acknowledging FireFox

[aqk]

FWIW, when I browsed Microsoft's site to see what
was up with their new Silverfish
(or is it Silver Lite?), they gave me a choice of
downloading the IE plugin or the Firefox plugin...

Re:A small victory

[Bert64]

Regardless of who made it...

IE:
Has poor support for standards like CSS, and has done for years thus stunting web development. Very little has been done to fix this, even in 7.
Has loads of outstanding rendering bugs
Completely stagnated for 5 years, and only had development resumed due to pressure from firefox (again stunting web development)
Supports activex, which is incredibly poorly designed and a security liability.

I would like to write my site using modern CSS features. I can't, because people viewing the site with ie wouldn't see them properly. And rather than degrading appearane gracefully, it makes a half assed attempt at rendering the CSS resulting in a really ugly look.
IE is a horrendously outdated browser, the sooner it dies, the sooner the web can move on.

I'm from Slovenia ...

[Pegasus]

And heck, I use opera. Ffox is too slow for what I expect from "internet expirience".

Also I maintain three of the top 10 visited sites in Slovenia (mostly by teenagers) and the stats there are:

ie 70%, ffox 27%, opera 1.6%.
ie 6 50%, mozilla 37%, ie 7 9%, opera 1.5%
ie 6 60%, mozilla 29%, ie 7 7%, opera 1.6%

So there ... I have no idea where did this survey dig those numbers.

Stats for Macedonia

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there is no data in the article, this is from march Awstats of the most popular Macedonian website

blog.com.mk (339445 Unique visitors)

MS Internet Explorer 10505723 44.9 %
Firefox 9643764 41.2 %
Mozilla 1772931 7.5 %
Opera 677997 2.9 %

Re:A small victory

[jovius]

The school institutions in Finland are actively pushing firefox because it has the reputation of being secure. (Ministry of Justice changed to openoffice since 2007 btw). The IT at the place I study replaces IE with firefox in all the machines they install (hundreds of machines). Firefox penetration in schools of all levels, universities etc places is nearly 100 percent. I have seen only a few machines with IE. IE is nearly non existant. The public internet booths and libraries use Firefox. If not firefox, they use netscape or opera. The Fox is a sympathetic figure... The only public skewing the statistics are the ones who are not IT aware enough to change their browser, or like IE for some reason. The people who use IE because they like it are in clear minority.

Re:The numbers for the Netherlands are not surpris

[rprins]

What the heck? Equalitarian? No distinguishing from peers? In what part of Holland have you been living??

I would explain the 13.3% with the wide-spread use of Internet. Every noob I know surfs the Internet regularly, and hardly any of them care about technology. They just see computers and the Internet as a means to something else and are happy with what works (and the difference FF : IE is not that big). Also note that MSN is by far the superior IM here Short article on MSN usage in The Netherlands [smartmobs.com] [smartmobs.com]. There is no anti-Microsoft feeling here, including universities, which indeed are highly Microsoft dependent. A lot of IT-students have never even heard of OpenOffice. Nothing will change with Vista even though MS screwed it up. Personally, I'm praying for ReactOS.

Re:IE States: More Useful?

[g0sub]

It used to be mostly an American phenomena (who did Apple bribe to get in to all those schools?). The new Apple white design thing with slick OS has made Macs a populear choice in Europe as well. This of course is happening at the same time as proprietary Windows apps loose terrain every day. As long as you don't play games most people can use whatever platform they want, be it Mac or FreeBSD or Ubuntu...

Re:Yeah but...

[Eivind]

Actually, prostitution is perfectly legal in large parts of Europe. Netherlands, sure, but also say Denmark, Germany, England, Switzerland or Norway.

In some of these its regulated, for example in Norway prostitution as such is legal -- but pimping (as in financially benefitting from the prostitution of others) is outlawed.

Re:Yeah but...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is why you should (at least once in your life) read a book about the law of the land. I don't know if that is even covered in "citizenship lessons" at school :-)

Prostitution is legal in England and Wales. The following are illegal IIRC: soliciting (loitering on the street: Street Offences Act 1959), kerbcrawling (looking for prostitutes while driving), living off immoral earnings (pimping or brothel running). Advertising is common in magazines or on the internet but must not be tooo graphic.

Re:Ballmer chair jokes....

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Oh yeah that'll spur innovation, take away the incentive to become successful by giving all your profits to the government. Then we'll only have 1 monopoly.

You are mistaken. The objective is not to remove the ability to earn more then the average member of the middle class, it is to make it progressively harder to climb the wealth scale, which is the exact oposite to the natural state of affairs in which wealth accumulation past certain point results in the sheer volume of capital in one's control creating ever more opportunities for more profit. Making it impractical for a single individual to expand his business exponentially by definition opens room for competition from other individuals in the same marketplace. This results in a multitude of smaller companies being created as long as the demand exceeds supply as opposed to the current mechanism of mergers and acquisitions which reduces competition drastically until oligopolies and monopolies are all that remains.

As a matter of fact this very system was in place in the USA during its most prosperous for most of its citizens time, that is in 1950s and 1960s when the middle class expanded rapidly and innovation bloomed like in no time before.

Yet at that very time top bracket tax rates were around 90%.

Coincidence? Me thinks not.