Firefox gained market share in 2007

29 Jan 2008 | 11:06 GMT

By Egan Orion

MOZILLA'S FIREFOX Internet browser gained market share against Microsoft's Internet Explorer in European region countries and elsewhere during 2007, the French Internet traffic analysis firm XiTi Monitor has reported.

Firefox is within a few percentage points of pulling ahead of Internet Explorer in some countries. Its share is 45.4 per cent in Finland, 42.4 per cent in Poland, 41.2 per cent in Slovenia and 40.3 per cent in Hungary.

Market penetration of Firefox has also moved into the 30's percentiles range in Estonia, Greece, Germany, Latvia, Romania, Austria and Croatia as well as throughout Oceania, that is, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific.

Firefox adoption falls somewhere within the 20's percentiles in Ireland, Sweden, France, Belgium, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Italy and Bulgaria.

Wired ascribes Firefox's success to the better and more nimble capabilities of its volunteer army of open source coders to create international localisations when a new version of the browser is released. It writes, "While Microsoft supports 36 languages, there are over 40 language-specific versions of Firefox available now with more in beta."

XiTi Monitor reported that the Vole's Internet Explorer has an overall 66.1 per cent worldwide market share and that Firefox has a 28 per cent market share, which is a new high. It said Opera has a 3.3 per cent market share and Safari has 2 per cent.

XiTi Monitor also said that more than 90 per cent of Firefox users are running the latest version, Firefox 2, while fewer than half of Internet Explorer users have migrated from IE6 to IE7. µ

L'INQ
Wired

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007