Firefox ahead of IE in Europe, boosted by Chrome effect

so?

any news on the notepad vs kedit wars?

By Country

It's interesting looking at their stats by country, the far west of Europe is much like North America while further east is where the Firephiles come in. South America is also interesting.

Opera?

"That's why I use Opera.

I feel sorry for those that can't be bothered to explore alternatives, or just believe everything they read in a Microsoft/Apple/Google/Mozilla press release."

People have explored alternatives, this is why Firefox leads, they think Opera sucks!

Good.

Hopefully, this will finally convince the last remaining few followers of the "This Site Is Best Viewed With Internet Explorer 6 on A Colour Monitor" school of web design that it's not the customers that suck, it's their web development platform.

Mind you, it has improved a lot in recent years. It's also a nice comeback for the idiots at "why firefox is blocked.com". Several big players in the browser market makes for an environment where you can't favour one, and are therefore more or less forced to stick to standards.

Important for developers, not for users

Market share isn't that relevant for end-users - as long as it renders properly, it doesn't matter whether your browser is used by half the population or you just wrote it yourself.

As a developer, though, it's a glimmer of hope for us, and a weapon to use against lingering legacy IE-only problem software. There was a time when companies could say "well, IE's used by 90% of our customers, so screw the rest" - somehow this was acceptable to them, even when they'd never have accepted their physical stores being unusable by left handed people. Now, even the dumbest outfit should struggle with "our site only works properly for a minority of people"!

Firefox blocked

"why firefox is blocked.com"

Never seen this before!!! What a retarded site!

Interesting numbers

UK, Italy, Spain, Denmark- IE dropped over year but still at 50%

Germany, Hungary - Firefox stable at about 50-60%

France - IE dropping to around 40-45%, IE stable at 35%ish

Netherlands - IE at 60ish, FF at 25ish

(then got bored looking up countries)

Are we seeing cultural preferences for browsers, or for StatCounters software.

the debate

IE's domination came very close to destroying the web's open nature, what with its own interpretations of HTML and proprietary technologies like Active X which if widely adopted would have locked out other vendors forever.

I really hope that we continue to see no vendor with more than 50% of the web, and better still, no more than 40%. It is this diversity that has ensured more focus on web standards both by browser vendors and web sites.

And the present level of browser development has seen huge improvements in stability and speed for all browsers (the javascript engine race being a great example).

Regardless of what browser you use, you benefit from a market where there is real competition.

Title

I use IE 8. It's free, its protected mode is very secure and it boots up a lot faster than FF. Job done.

Defiant

All soft ware is compiled into machine code at some point. I want proof that Opera was written in machine code and not compiled into machine code

IE diminishing & Opera bashing

Nice to see IE dropping, however, slowly. Congrats to Google for their wall-to-wall advertising for Chrome and the Firefox community. Also, kudos to Opera for having the guts to make the Windows browser ballot a reality to level the monopoly OS playing-field.

The pain inflicted on web designers by Microsoft is torturous. The time involved to get sites to work in IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9 is horrific. The other browsers are pushing open standards and are making things quite a bit more efficient, though still a ways to go with HTML5, CSS, SVG.

The IE pain on users from unpatched vulnerabilities and virii is also quite horrendous (and continues to this day with the last massive MS patch day).

Choosing ANY of the other desktop browsers is a big step up. I happen to choose Opera. Try it out, if you haven't...it's really impressive.

Btw, the reflexive Opera bashing has been really tiresome for 10 yrs...and in the end, there are 160 million Opera users and growing, with a booming #1 mobile browser worldwide, running on 3000 phone models including iPhone, Androids, and Blackberries, while saving 80% of your mobile data costs with Opera Mini and Turbo (and Opera for Android tablets & iPad coming soon).

Whatever you think about Opera, you can't say they don't spend a majority of their mobile & search-bar profits on open-web issues for the benefit of all, even though they're a for-profit company.

In the end, no one can deny that Opera is the tail wagging the dog, for 15 yrs, with their continuous stream of innovation that others "borrow." (I like the latest feature...search suggestions for Google, Bing, and Wikipedia, without any settings to change, all from the unified address bar & tab stacks...nice.)

http://www.opera.com/docs/history/

And if you don't believe Opera's prominence, ask yourself why then, is Google browser-sniffing to block Opera from various site features, like Google Instant and dissing Opera at every turn, like in their help pages; and trying to scare users away from Opera...?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20016008-264.html

I use them all

For Web development Firefox cause of the add-ons, otherwise Chrome. I use Opera to open really big xml files etc, but I dont like it except it is fast. I use IE for testing only. And of course my desktop is Ubuntu.

re: Errm

"It's not backed by the biggest corporations on the planet (Apple/Microsoft/Google)..."

Nice how you don't mention FF, Opera's closest competitor, and the subject of this article.

As for secure... how do you KNOW Opera is secure? Maybe it has critical vulnerabilities too but nobody bothered to check. Linux style security... nobody cares enough to attack it.

Is 3 seconds too slow for FF

Unless you turn on and off your PC frenquently, it normally takes me 3 seconds to turn on FF (V4.0b8) with loaded local contents.