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...