European web metrics company Xiti has published browser market share statistics for March. The data indicates that the open-source Firefox web browser has climbed to almost 29 percent market share in Europe, where it is still steadily increasing in popularity. This is no small accomplishment.
The European country that saw the most growth was Andorra, where Firefox marketshare rose from 22.7 percent in February to 24.8 percent in March. The three countries with the highest Firefox market share are Finland, Poland, and Slovenia, which all have between 43 and 46 percent. Notably, the study saw the average market share exceed 30 percent during weekends, likely because of people who are using Internet Explorer at work and Firefox at home, by choice.
According to Xiti, Internet Explorer has lost 2.5 percentage points during the past six months. Opera and Safari have also seen slight gains during that time period to 3.3 and 2.3 percent, respectively. Xiti does not provide statistics for iPhone browser marketshare and the report does not specify whether or not iPhone browsing is counted as part of the Safari statistics.
Xiti's global statistics indicate that Oceania—comprised of Australia and New Zealand—has the highest Firefox market share of any continent, with 31.2 percent. The continent with the lowest marketshare is Asia, at 17.2 percent. In many parts of Asia, Firefox has trouble competing with Maxthon, a browser created in China that uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine.
Xiti surprisingly found that Firefox market share in North America actually dropped by one percentage point in March. I initially suspected that the apparent drop might have been caused by users who were running Firefox 3 pre-releases, but that hypothesis didn't hold up when I examined the user agent strings. Firefox 3 betas all correctly report that they are Firefox. It is true that the nightly builds identify themselves as Minefield instead of Firefox, but it's unlikely that there are enough Minefield users to generate that much of a change.
Another factor that could possibly have contributed to the drop in North America was the release of the vastly improved Safari 3.1 for Windows, which Apple pushed out to its massive iTunes userbase through its software update system. But that also seems unlikely.
Despite the dip in North America, Firefox is clearly continuing to gain popularity around the world. This trend will likely get a big boost from the release of Firefox 3 later this year.
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