We recently did a report on how Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari were doing in the United States. Google, after all, just hit the brag-worthy benchmark of 10% of all used browsers. The picture in Europe, however, looks different across the board. So, let’s do a quick check-in on our friends across the sea, and ask, “how are European countries approaching the Web?”
The figures from a StatCounter study were released on Mashable, and they may just surprise you. The biggest shocker of the lot? Internet Explorer is, for the first time in recent history, in second place as a browser. For European nations, the top browser is actually Firefox, which edged ahead of IE’s 37.52% with 38.11% of all browser use.
Does this mean that Firefox is exploding in popularity in Europe? No, actually. They stood at a nearly identical position to where they were at last year. The key player in Europe is Google Chrome, who grew all the way to 14.58% of the market, nearly tripling its European presence over the course of the year. It seems that Chrome is pushing Microsoft aside. “Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer,” said Aodhan Cullen, the CEO of StatCounter.
Of course, both the growth of Chrome and the decline of IE have a lot to do with a decision made by the European Commission at the beginning of 2010. It was ruled that, to avoid a monopolistic approach, Windows would have to provide a new screen during the system’s initial setup. This screen would allow users to choose which browser they wanted to use, with all the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera) being provided as alternatives.
This information comes from a StatCounter report which took analytics data from over three million different sites, giving a total sample size of literally billions of page views.
