Firefox continues to spread, especially throughout Europe. Mozilla Europe’s President Tristan Nitot, recently posted on his blog (and PMO) that the French Internet monitoring firm XitiMonitor has released a report (Fr) stating that Firefox now is approaching 28% market share in Europe.
“One could argue over statistics for ever. I have met with the Xiti
team a few months ago to get a better understanding of what they
measure. Basically, they have what they call markers
(actually small images) on literally millions of Websites, mostly in
Western Europe. This means they get billions of hits every month, and
then analyse which browser engine were used to display these images.
There are a few caveats, as always, in such measurements:
- What they call Firefox is actually gecko-enabled browsers (mostly Firefox, but also Seamonkey, Epiphany and M-meleon);
- They measure hits, not visitors. There is a difference, in
the sense that Firefox users are generally more advanced than IE users
(they know what a browser is, and how to download and install
software). Also, I understand that Firefox users are generally more
likely to spend time online and visit more Websites.To sum things up, XitiMonitor tracks “Gecko usage” more than
“Firefox users”. Both are correlated, but not identical. And both
indicators are consistently going upwards
(Thanks Percy for the graphs!) In some countries such as Slovenia,
Firefox has passed Internet Explorer. Gerv even wants to launch a Hug a Slovenian’ campaign“
Good news all around for both the Mozilla Project and Firefox 
[Image reproduced from Standblog]
