Firefox share up again in Europe

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

January 30, 2008, 1:33 PM

The average usage share of Mozilla's browser among European nations rose to 28 percent in December, up .7 percent from the month previous, XiTi Monitor finds.

A report by the Web survey institute XiTi Monitor released yesterday showed that, when European nations' averaged their Web sites' usage shares together, usage share for Firefox appeared to rebound slightly.

From a period from June through November, Firefox's share remained fairly stable, swinging between 27.0% and 27.6%. However, it has begun to rise once again, headed by Finland and Slovenia, whose shares of 45.4% and 44.6%, respectively, are the highest in the EU.

On the other side, The Netherlands sees the lowest usage for Firefox at 14.7%, followed by Ukraine at 16.6%. Both countries actually saw decreases from the month previous at 0.1% and 0.3% respectively.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer saw its share in Europe fall from November to December, down .8% to 66.1%. However, even at that level it remains more than two times the level of Firefox.

Opera counts as the third most used browser among EU nations with 3.3%, followed by Safari at 2.0%. Rounding out the top five was Netscape, which still was hanging on with a .5% market share.