Via Brian's site I got to an article in XiTi Monitor regarding the latest statistics for Firefox use in Europe. The good news is that it's still growing with an increase of 2% in the year to December 2007. Estonia is up to 37.3%, while Finland still leads with 45.4%. Very sluggish in France, 25.8% and Spain 21.5%, with Britain continuing to lag behind on 17.2%, just above Ukraine 16.6% and the Netherlands with 14.7%
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. A great many of the places that I visit (to the extent of about 80%) when I'm teaching are still using Internet Explorer 6, and we've not even got to IE7! A great many people have never seen Firefox either, which is even more depressing, although most have now at least heard of it. Not doing anything is the easiest option of course, and why bother to upgrade when IE6 is apparently working well? Forgive the cynicism here, but when tech. support people are blocking access to a wide variety of new applications they're hardly likely to embrace a new browser - far too much work for them.
My figures on Firefox use in July 2007 and December 2006.
17.2% sounds too high for the UK. Our logs of over 500 million pages served per month, primarily to UK-based users, are showing Firefox at just over 10%. I'm not sure where XiTi get their data, but I would suspect their sample is biased in favour of technical users/early adopters.
Posted by: Mike Scott | February 28, 2008 at 09:47 AM