Firefox Now Serious Threat to IE in Europe

Tookis writes "Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."

Methodology

[echucker]

While the article doesn't mention how, a previous study [xitimonitor.com] on XiTiMonitor's site shows that they're using share of visits by each browser type to the sites in question.

Re:Wish for US

[Anonymous Coward]

IE Tab [mozilla.org]

Re:Not what we're seeing

[dvice_null]

It is no wonder if you see low statistics in UK. That is because it is one of the worst countries in Firefox market share:

Slovenia 47.9%
Finland 45.4%
Slovakia 40.4%

6 nations 35-40% ( Ireland jumped here (55% more users since last monitoring 4 months ago) and now has 38.6% share )
6 nations 30-35%
0 nations 25-30%
8 nations 20-25%
8 nations 15-20% ( UK is here with 18.7% )

http://www.xitimonitor.com/fr-fr/barometre-des-nav igateurs/firefox-juillet-2007/index-1-1-3-102.html [xitimonitor.com]

Re:The figures are misleading

[janrinok]

Well changing the UA string with my UK bank's website makes the difference between 'Your browser is not supported' to a fully functioning web page which obviously doesn'trequire anything in IE to make it work. Mock all you want, I have to do this all the time - and I have just checked again to make sure that I am correct.

Re:I'm forced to use IE 8+ hours a day

[gratemyl]

Just as a tip - try PortableFirefox (http://portableapps.com/ [portableapps.com]), it should bypass the "remove firefox" script.

Re:Not what we're seeing

[SiChemist]

If you had read the article (and ignore the typo where they put IE instead of FF), they say:

"Although clear market share gains for FF were reported in every single European territory, countries where [FF] still has not reached 20% market share include Britain, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Norway and Denmark."

So, your results DO match up with theirs.

Re:Hoo-ray

[SpecTheIntro]

Yeah, the well-known insurmountable power of communism over Western school systems. I'm pissing my pants.

It has nothing to do with communism, and everything to do with the politics of WWII. The reason Nazi Germany is covered more thoroughly and often thought of as worse than Stalin's USSR is because:

1.) Stalin was our ally at the time, and pointing out the systematic slaughter he carried out against his own people would not have been good for domestic support of the war.
2.) The Nazis committed the Holocaust, and we in the West have convinced ourselves that killing based on political ideology is more palatable than killing based on ethnic/cultural/religious identity.

If you bother to pick up a history book, though, or even just look at the total dead under Stalin's regime, you'll quickly begin to see that Hitler had nothing on Stalin. Hitler killed roughly 9-11 million in the Holocaust. The general consensus, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], is that Stalin killed at least that many, and likely killed nearly twice that amount. Stalin just chose the right group of people with whom to ally. And, he didn't specifically target the Jews. If history has taught us anything, it's that killing the Jews never works out as intended.

Re:IE still had some + points

[BiggerIsBetter]

That's doable for Firefox as well:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:2.0_Institutional_ Deployment [mozilla.org]

and inparticular:

http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/mcs/FirefoxADM/Readme.ht m [ed.ac.uk]

Re:Great

[catscan2000]

Or you can use `openssl s_client -host www.somesite.com -port 443` for HTTPS sites :-)

It's FX, not FF!

[Tutsumi]

Bloody hell, it's people like you who spread a false abbreviation. FX is Firefox. FF is Final Fantasy. Check the spreadfirefox website for FX. They ask people to stop calling them FF. DO IT.

Re:It's about Freedom.

[Ansoni-San]

You do know the Acid2 test is meaningless right? No browser fully supports CSS2, so even out of the best browsers it's still a lucky dip depending on exactly where your weak-points in support are and exactly what the minor issues are. So the Acid2 test is pretty useless if you're a user that wants any realistic information on how good any of the current browsers are. I would have thought it was well known to be useless by now.

Opera and Firefox CSS2 support are pretty much equal, with Opera being miles ahead in print support and Firefox having better support (read less niggles) in other areas more important to screen media. Which pretty much balances out to me. Of course the print support etc. trade off balancing out is only my personal opinion.

It's true

[mrk1283]

At work the number of times a user has phoned up for administration help or regular support and they are using Firefox has doubled over the past few months and it's still growing especially when browsing is far more easier in Firefox. People are also tagging onto the idea of extensions like IEtab where some sites only work in IE so people use IEtab in Firefox. It's awesome.

Re:IE 4 vrs Dillo.

[NickFortune]

Ive had Ubuntu loaded on this machine and it didnt seem any faster then XP

It won't. Full fledged Ubuntu needs a decent system spec. Gnome has got its own framework overheads, and Ubuntu adds a lot more newbie friendly stuff that ups the system reqs to about the same as XP. Ubuntu is a lovely distro in a great many ways, but svelte it ain't.

sure I probably could have custimized it to hell

You could try XUbuntu. Uses XFCE rather than Gnome, and uses a lot less in the way of resources. You can install it from Ubuntu using synaptic. Did it in about 10 mins on my wife's old desktop machine. I'm still not sure it would cope with a PII, but it runs just fine on a Windows ME era AMD Duron system. Which is more than can be said of vanilla Ubuntu.

Failing that, look at some of the lightweight distros. The slackware derivatives seem to be good at this, so Vector Linux might be a good place to start. Or else Damn Small Linux, if you can persuade it to install on the HD and not run from a ramdisk.

but who has the time and the need to do that

Well, if you don't need it, don't do it. Personally, I'd sooner my resources were doing what I tell them to, rather than monitoring the system to see if I needed a help bubble popping up, or a usb drive mounted - but I admit I'm not the typical user. Then again, if you have old hardware, and you can't upgrade for whatever reason, it's not a bad angle to explore. It certainly beats using out-of-support Windows 98 because you can't cope with XP.

Re:Hoo-ray

[Khazunga]

...unlike IE, which is free and doesn't generate any revenue...

Firefox gathers revenue from the default search engine setting (google). If I remember correctly, MSIE has the exact same search interface, default set to MSN. It does generate revenue, even if it is not accounted for by Microsoft.

There are other internal revenue streams. It's just that this one is in your face; perfectly identical to FF's.

Re:The figures are misleading

[SharpFang]

bph.pl

It "theoretically" supports Firefox, but you need to jump through hoops to get it running (e.g. extract a filename from source of the page, download it to hard drive, save it in a directory somewhere in Firefox plugins). Otherwise you can log in, you can view your account, but you just can't sign (and in effect finalize) any transaction.