Firefox gains market share across Europe

According to French Web metrics company, XiTi Monitor, Mozilla’s Firefox browser gained market share in 90% of European countries in December.

At the end of the year, Firefox held a 28% share of the European browser market, a 5 per cent improvement on 2006.

Firefox made its gains at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but Internet Explorer still remains way out in front, with a 66 per cent share of the market, according to XiTi Monitor research.

Firefox is strongest in Finland, where it holds nearly half the market (48 per cent). It also holds over 40 per cent in Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

Firefox repeated this success across the world, with growth in all continents. Its strongest region is Oceania, where it held 31 per cent of the market at the end of 2007.

The battle of the browsers is set to extend to the mobile arena. Mozilla has an alpha version of Minimo, a mobile browser based on Firefox, while Google is developing a browser for its forthcoming Android platform.