Firefox now a serious threat to IE in Europe: report
Mozilla's Firefox (FF) web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor.
Context & Ripple Effects
Firefox's European surge did not come out of nowhere. The Washington Post tracked its early momentum back in December 2005 (Firefox Moves Farther Ahead of the Hunt), and a year later analysts argued that as the browser infiltrated the enterprise, its share would keep climbing. Even Microsoft's own counterpunch — IE 7, with 100 million installs by January 2007 — failed to stop the erosion, according to InformationWeek's reporting at the time.
What is new in the XiTiMonitor data is the geography and the slope: gains concentrated across Europe, with an upturn in the past four months that suggests the shift is accelerating rather than plateauing. For Microsoft, which is simultaneously fighting perception problems on other fronts — Vista users still complaining about flaws six months after launch, per recent coverage — the browser is becoming another front it cannot easily defend.
First-order effects
- Mozilla's Firefox takes measurable usage share from Internet Explorer across Europe over the past year, with the steepest movement in the last four months per XiTiMonitor — meaning Microsoft's default-installation advantage is no longer converting into locked-in usage there.
Second-order effects
- Web developers and European sites now face a dual-rendering burden, testing for Firefox alongside IE, while Microsoft is pushed to make IE 7's security and standards story compelling enough to win back users rather than rely on Windows bundling.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the browser market structurally reverts to genuine competition after IE's post-Netscape monopoly years, making standards-compliant rendering and cross-browser compatibility a baseline requirement rather than an IE-only assumption for the whole web ecosystem.
The trend: The browser market is reverting to two-engine competition, with open-source Firefox eroding Internet Explorer's default-driven dominance region by region.