Report: Firefox threatens IE in Europe

The French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor reports that Mozilla's Firefox is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser in Europe. The open source browser is rapidly gaining in popularity in comparison to Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).

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%. The July market share represents a massive 3.7% rise since a similar survey in March.

 

There has been a reluctance of IE users to adopt the latest version of the browser IE7, even in markets where IE is strong.

Only about one third of IE users have adopted IE7 compared to 85% of FF users who have adopted the latest version of the browser, FF2. Significantly, FF2 has a greater market share than IE7 in 17 European territories, while IE7 is ahead of FF2 in 16 territories.