French Web metrics firm XiTi just released the
latest figures about the market share of Mozilla Firefox.
It shows that Mozilla Firefox has achieved over 20 percent
market share in Europe. This figure was calculated by
an average from the figures obtained for each European country.

personally, i have been using firefox since 0.5final and
my computer has totally isolated from malwares since then

Source:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applicati...39247539,00.htm

At first i thought

"no way can 1/5 of people in europe use firefox, becasue very few people in england do".

but after some further reading i can acept that, it's just england is dragging the average down with only 1 in 10[unsurprizing really from such a slow, conservative country].

the main reason stated for this level of use being so high is that it was taken at the weekend so that it represented home usage rather than corporate use [at companies that wont allow their staff to change software.

this is amazing, the internet must be changing, these are the raw stats for a website called boing boing. i dont know much about it but it seams fairly normal, it certainly isnt a open source website.

This does not surprise me. When I studied and worked in Germany for year, a lot of the students had dual boot laptops with both XP and SuSE Linux at the time. Mainly because SuSE was a home grown German developed software system based on Linux. In fact the Fachhochschule had a Linux Lab.

I looked horribly out of place for most of the semester with my 14.1" iBook. Finally there were a couple of nice looking German girls that eventually showed up with their 12.1" iBooks so I didn't feel like such the outcast. But man did the German students give me crap until I showed them how best to run Windows 2000: in a Window on a mac. Then double click else where and get a real Unix prompt...Anyway I loved taunting them back as well. Especially when I conntected to the wireless (first time I used my airport card was in Europe) and they didn't see any cards hanging out the side of the laptop.

As a whole though, Germany tended to have smaller Cell phones that we did in the US, were more open to using Wi-Fi technology (wifi didn't catch on until about 18 months after I got back home) and Linux. Some how I have a feeling that it has to do more with the fact that Microsoft is a US company and the view many in Europe take of any US company.

Most Americans, especially home users, don't care and will use what is provided reguardless of alternatives. Hell, my dad still runs Windows 98 and Netscape 8 browser. All he does is check email online, check stocks, and plays solitare...oh and does his taxes...that's it.