Firefox Now Serious Threat to IE in Europe

Tookis writes "Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. 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%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."

Comments

Re:Hoo-ray

[Bin Naden]

Junk (I.E.) is being replaced with more junk (Firefox). Yes, it's better junk, but junk none the less.

At least it isn't proprietary junk that doesn't follow standards and tries to shut out the competition. It's a step forward.

Wish for US

[markdavis]

Well, I wish that were the case in the US. There are still *FAR* too many sites that have IE-only components. So, although the vast majority (90%+) of sites we use (at work) work for us (we use only FireFox), there are still a few important sites that cause a nightmare for us. Since we use Linux only, running IE is not an option. (And yes, I know about emulators and IES4Linux, which are nice, but don't work everywhere, don't work well for thin clients, and/or are difficult to maintain).

What is more irritating is that those few IE-only sites are about 95% working with Firefox. There are usually only a few parts of the site that don't work (but that is all it takes). With minimal correction/effort, those sites would work on any platform. But even after repeated begging (on one, for YEARS), a few such sites have still had no interest in "fixing" things. I do wish there was a version of Firefox/Mozilla that had an IE-compatibility mode... "FireIE Fox" or something, for use in such cases.

Fortunately, another few broken sites finally "saw the light", probably due to complaints from people like us, and fixed things.

Re:Wish for US

[janrinok]

Now look, I didn't say the Microsoft isn't stupid, but changing the rest of the world to suit MS is not the way I choose to go. Why should we modify everything else to suit one company?

But the solution is easier still. MSIE doesn't have to change, if people just stop designing websites that use MS-specific extensions. It can be done, you know. MSIE can accept whatever it wants but if no-one is using MS specific extensions then it will still work.

Re:Browser usage

[TheRaven64]

Mod parent up, but can we also have a breakdown on weekday Vs weekend figures. During the week, a lot of people are accessing Slashdot from work, where they are not allowed to install non-IE browsers. At the weekend (hopefully) the percentage of Slashdot users at work will be lower. Just don't forget about time zones...

Re:IE 7

[quintesse]

You might be modded funny, but it's TRUE! I don't know what MS was thinking but IE7 is butt-ugly! It's turning in one of those christmas tree decoration interfaces like those media player skins. Out the window with consistent design etc, let's make it actually more difficult to use our products, maybe then the people will understand the added value of windows! No, really , I have NO idea why they're doing it, it just seems illogical.

Re:Whee! Monopoly Exploit Time

[dvice_null]

Firefox's goal is to make the web use standards, so that you could select what browser you want to use. How many websites you have seen that work only with Firefox? And how many that work only with IE? That is they key difference.

So once Firefox has majority of the global market share, the web has already been converted to work with any browser and we (users, companies, developers, anyone except Microsoft) have won.

Re:Protectionism?

[cp.tar]

Does this statistic underline or undermine the argument that integrating and bundling IE with Windows harmed the competition?

It does neither.

That the bundling of IE with Windows practically destroyed the competition at one point is a historical fact; however, the competition's picking up again has got to do with something completely different, though related: having annihilated the competition, MS stopped innovating - actually, MS stopped doing anything about it. The war was won, there was nothing left to do, and any further innovation in a market you monopolize would be redundant.

Netscape failed because Microsoft managed to build a good enough product, bundled it with Windows and then improved at least to the point people wouldn't bother downloading Netscape. It was a hard blow, and Netscape never recovered, though they might have.

Now, history is repeating itself; this time Microsoft sat on their collective heels and Mozilla hit them.