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Firefox Usage Near 25% In Europe
PARENA writes "French researcher Xiti claims that Mozilla Firefox keeps winning terrain in Europe. 24.1% of Internet users in Europe use Firefox. Slovenia (44.5%), Finland (41.3%), Croatia (36.5%), and Germany (36.2%) lead the way, followed by a group of mostly Eastern European countries. Remarkably, The Netherlands is only at 13.3%, right before Andorra. Oceania maintains a slight lead over Europe, at 24.8%; the rest of the world trails at 11.9% to 15.1%."
I'm impressed with Slovenia and Finland at over 40% penetration. Though they're relatively small countries population wise, the Firefox teams have really made a substantial impact there. These successes are what it really takes for people to notice Firefox in the mainstream. 40% probably puts them near the share Internet Explorer has locally which is definitely a great step. The article also shows Australia at 25% which is awesome. Great numbers all around, keep up the great work.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Internet Explorer works decent enough for the average user. Outside of the US, I'm betting the internationalization support of Firefox is a good promoting factor. If you could have your native language be garbled based on very picky Internet Explorer language rules and parsing, or Firefox, which would you pick?
On a related note, I'd like to see a study as to how accurate translations are, too, when comparing FireFox (and others) to IE.
You think a country full of people who don't care about an illegal war in Iraq, the abuse of our rights at the (blatant and unveiled!) hands of our president, or any apparent concern for the finer points of logic and reasoning would actually give a crap about what browser they use?
Their computers come with Internet Explorer, and it's good enough. They're not going to embrace Firefox just for the sake of it, because they're entirely apathetic about almost everything to begin with.
We Americans haven't had to fight for anything or even really compete. Students don't have to learn, and people readily embrace each other when a Wikipedia link makes them think they're experts on legal and business processes (*cough*implied warranties*cough*). Complacency explains a lot, including the relatively slower uptake of Firefox.
First IE slowly being replaced by superior FF.
Then Open Office (or less bloated equivalents like Abiword) will come and kick out Word and al from grandma computers. Then average Joe will not be able to watch his movies on Vista and noone will have a copy of XP handy. So his 12-year old will install Ubuntu.
And wmv and other non-open formats will die, too. People are getting burned by DRM tricks and lock-ins.
Well... I like to dream.
I know there are some different opinions about how many continents there are and what they're called. But most Americans consider Australia to be its own continent, and count all of the other islands as part of Asia. In fact, in American questionnaires about race, you will see the category "Asian/Pacific Islander".
More technically educated users are more likely to choose Firefox, as less technically educated users can only use what they are spoon fed.
If you look at the map in TFA, it is almost more-or-less a map of how much countries spend on equipping their schools properly and providing decent technical skills to their population. These countries will run ahead within the IT industry of Europe. Sadly my nation (UK) will probably not be one of them.
My little Linux and tech blog
How do you figure the US is lagging behind?
Look at the guys map, South America, and surprisingly - Asia, seem to have the slowest uptake.
The map doesn't have US specifically, but go ahead and assume that North America means USA only. We don't pay much attention to mexico or canada either.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you look at the number of teams to population size for Software Freedom Day (which often involves people handing out CDs with Firefox and other free software) you'll see some correlation to these usage stats.
For example, compare the USA (24 teams) with Australia (19 teams). When you consider that the US population is over ten times bigger than Australia's population (298,444,215 vs 20,264,082), is it any wonder that Software Freedom Day is more effective in "Oceania" than it is in the US?
Not to mention the cultural differences in accepting software from random people on the street in the US, Europe and Australia.
How we know is more important than what we know.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I know Seible is owned by Oracle now, but not for that long.
Where I work, we use a web-based Seible product called crmondemand. It will only work correctly with MSIE. The Firefox MSIE plug-in doesn't help.
I admin a varied collection of sites in Swedish. The metrics for a couple of these over the last month follow.
University amateur theater (spex) site: 73.4% Firefox, 22.0% IE, 1.4% Opera, 0.2% Safari
Family discussion board and photo album: 85.9% Firefox, 7.8% IE, 1.8% Safari
Professional photographer's site: 49.4% IE, 32.9% Firefox, 13.1% Safari
Linux laptop installation instructions (English): 49.1% Firefox, 38.2% IE, 2.8% Safari, 2.8% Opera
Personal page about my boat: 59.6% IE, 35.8% Firefox, 2.2% Safari, 0.4% Opera
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
There was a time when the very real fear that if Microsoft achieve total dominance on the client that they could (and would) leverage that influence to the server by coupling new extension that only work with IE/IIS combination. The WWW would become the WMW :(
So this increasing market share of Firefox is good news. The threat of a single client achieving complete dominance is past now, I believe - a bullet dodged.
As an aside. I have a customer that was concerned about this several years ago and she wanted to do her part so she requested a special mod to her shopping cart that recognizes the browser and gives a "Mozilla Users Discount" for the kindred users.
Interesting to see that it still works Sam McGees Hot Sauce"
I find it remarkable that 13.3% is considered "low."
If you don't see a difference I'd direct you here to the website of popular Rap duo "Kriss Kross". This page hasn't been updated since about 1996.
See the difference now?
If ID counts, here's some more numbers. It's from my game site, which has a fairly broad audience (few grandfathers, but lots of fathers and kids from 11 up) from around the world:
Firefox - 4295627 hits - 65.3 %
MS Internet Explorer - 1651317 hits - 25.1 %
Opera - 319524 hits - 4.8 %
Mozilla - 127876 hits - 1.9 %
Safari - 64764 hits - 0.9 %
And that with IE dropping and Firefox gaining share has been a steady trend for the past 3-4 years. Maybe my site gets more early adopters, and I am actively pushing Firefox (the only banner/ad I've ever had on my site), but the trend is still there.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's nice but it's not _the_ measure I'd like to see grow. What I'd like to see is the sum of all standards-compatible browsers to grow. I'd include at least all Geckos, Operas, and KHTML/WebKit/WebCore browsers.
Interestingly it was Commodore US that dragged the whole thing down... It was Commodore US who were responsible for the lack of development on new amiga hardware (although amiga was ahead of its time when it first came along, commodore did very little to keep that advantage), and it was commodore us that went bankrupt.
The UK and German arms of commodore were still profitable, and there was even talk of commodore uk buying out the american parent company.
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Operating system == kernel + user environment.
To your defence, those puritans were Europeans who, at the time, viewed themselves as superior.
On the other hand, those snooby Europeans moved past viewing themselves as superior (at least most of them).
Not long ago spiegel.de, Germany's largest print magazine's website (also one of the most visited), reported that after work hours Firefox users are the overwhelming majority, and only during work hours, when most visitors visit the site from their corporate computers over which the IT depmt. has control, does MS IE have the lead.
No, room 101 always has the worst for that particular person. Which means, for any true slashdotter, it will be filled with Windows machines DRMed to hell.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.