Firefox's Market Share Hits 28% in Europe

Mitchell's Boy Toy writes "Firefox's market share has hit 28.0% in Europe as of December 2007, according to a French web metrics firm. That's a 20.7% increase from the beginning of 2007. 'Finland currently has the highest Firefox market share in Europe with 45.4 percent, followed by Slovenia with 44.6 percent and Poland with 42.4 percent.' IE share fell to just 66.1% in December, a 0.9 point loss in just a month. It should also be noted that Firefox's success could spell trouble for Opera's antitrust complaint: 'Firefox's continued success in Europe may undermine some of the arguments made by Norwegian browser maker Opera in an antitrust complaint filed against Microsoft in December of last year. Opera accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the web browser market by tying Internet Explorer to Windows.'"

Comments

Opera's complaint was with IE's META switch

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, Opera's complaint isn't that IE is not following standards; their complaint is with this new IE8 feature. Microsoft is taking the stance that they COULD render a page in the most standard compliant way but they refuse to do so for currently developed pages.

This is a case where IE is cheating when it is running into the problem that other browser developers have had for years. Pages written for IE with IE's bugs render impropperly on browsers that dont have IE's bugs. The IE development team's mantra of "Dont break the web" should be clarified; it acutally is "Dont fix the web". They had an opprotunity to make a browser that renders today's pages in a standard compliant way. This would cause rendering problems in IE8, which would mean that the web site would actually fix their pages. This would not only be good for IE8 users, but also users of alternative browsers that actually care about rendering to web standards instead of rendering to whatever the largest browser says the page should look like.

Opera

[hilather]

Personally I think Operas anti-trust suit is a little ridiculous. Even though Microsoft may sell Windows with IE, how does Opera expect its consumers to download and install Opera without a web browser? Sure you could have someone put it on a disk for you, but its somewhat of a chicken and the egg problem, you need to start with something, and it might as well be a product Microsoft can include in its OS without having to go to a third party. I would be pretty upset if after installing Windows I couldn't browse the net.

Re:Opera

[TheRaven64]

Even though Microsoft may sell Windows with IE, how does Opera expect its consumers to download and install Opera without a web browser? By being OEMs. Every computer needs to come with a web browser, I'll agree, but if IE were not part of Windows then how many OEMs would bundle it? I'd imagine most would ship some cobranded version of Opera or Firefox and add it to their marketing ('comes with full-featured, secure, web browser with 90% more buzzwords than our leading competitor!').

Re:shouldn't undermine Opera's case

[yagu]

The key here is they can't compete... not that they can't get some business. Yes, people may have shown they go out of their way to download a different browser, but if the market is still severely skewed (IMO it is) because of a monopoly abuse, there is a case for a remedy.

Re:Firefox does come bundled, though

[poetmatt]

actually, as much as I don't really care for opera, I can see it doing better if FF gets dominant market share due to people then making websites that aren't IE optimized. When all browsers are created equal its just flavor preference. In those situations I suspect that FF and Safari will be tied for dominant browser (just my own prediction)
Additionally if I remember right early versions of opera had problems rendering things right as well, which would be resolved by IE taking a nosedive into some concrete.

Re:Opera is selling a product?

[ozmanjusri]

Except it won't really compete since it will be slower than all other mobile browsers. It will require an extremely high-end phone

WTF?

Where did that little bit of FUD come from? I'm using Firefox Mobile on my Nokia N800 right now, and it's very responsive. The Nokia only has a 330MHz OMAP processor, which is a slower than most Windows Mobile phones, let alone being "extremely high-end".

And Oceania at 31%

[NotZed]

Has a map of the whole world, not just a small part of it:

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,23136815-5014239,00.html

Re:Firefox does come bundled, though

[Bert64]

Actually, quite a lot of the sites i see advertised in spam require IE!

Re:shouldn't undermine Opera's case

[JohnBailey]

I'm not excusing bundling. I'm saying it's not severely skewing the market. If it were, the unbundling would mean IE's usage would definitely drop severely from 70-80% to under 50%. My personal experience with indifferent home users would tend to disagree with you.

So far, Everyone I have installed Firefox for has not switched back to IE, and are very impressed with the plugins and themes, and the spell checker in text fields. And of those who have tried IE7, only one likes it.

If IE was unbundled, then I don't think many people would download it as an informed choice, if anything, people might keep it around for Windows updates, but not much else. There are a lot of IE users, but at a guess, those that don't specifically need it to access a given web page are unaware of alternatives. The number of "IE by informed free choice" users I think is very small.