Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made more progress in its market share war with the industry-leading Internet Explorer 7. The Microsoft browser, which ships as standard with copies of Windows and Office, has by far the biggest user base. But in some European countries, it seems, Firefox is close to catching up.
New research from XiTi Monitor shows that Internet Explorer enjoys a 66.1 per cent majority share of the internet-browsing community.
Firefox is in second place with 28 per cent, with minnow browsers Opera and Safari in third and fourth place with 3.3 and 2 per cent respectively.
So far, so normal. But it's in some of the smaller European countries where the figures start to look good for Mozilla.
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland is one of the most tech-savvy nations in the world, and there Firefox enjoys a whopping 45 per cent share. In countries such as Poland and Hungary, Firefox's percentage share is also in the 40's. And in many other Eastern European countries, Firefox enjoys a larger-than-average market share.
This is most likely a result of Mozilla's squadron of open-source volunteers who enjoy nothing more than to translate the latest versions of the browser into niche languages
Of the heavyweight European countries, Germany is the most Firefox-friendly nation with 34 per cent of web surfers using Firefox as their browser of choice.
The UK, which generally tends to mirror trends in the USA, is a lot more Microsoft-friendly. Only 17.2 per cent of us have made the change to Firefox.
