Firefox overtakes IE in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Firefox overtakes IE in Europe

gs.statcounter.com

171 pointsrmc49 comments

I'm amazed by how regional things are, e.g. compare Germany with the UK. Firefox to IE is 62/22% in Germany, 23/52% in the UK.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-DE-monthly-201010-201012-...

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-GB-monthly-201010-201012-...

Globally, IE is at insane levels in South Korea (94%) and China (90% of which IE6 is 54%), Firefox is doing well in the Philippines at 47% with Chrome following close behind at 34%.

I guess the key take away is, as usual, know your own market.

edit: I wish you could easily see the countries with IE above 50%, I was surprised to see that by these stats the US just dropped below this level, mostly thanks to a strong showing from Apple's Safari compared with the rest of the world.

Great info, thanks. Before seeing this I was having a tendency to think of Europe, North America and Oceania as somewhat homogeneous WRT browser market share. While it seems the UK (and also Ireland[1]) does follow the other two regions, the rest of Europe is a different beast.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-IE-monthly-201010-201012-...

XiTi (now At Internet) used to make some of the best stats for the European market, like this: http://en.atinternet.com/Resources/Surveys/Browser-Barometer...

Since it became At Internet they stopped doing it this way though.

I love see statistics on StatCounter and I go often there, but i didn't see the Philippines! The deduction that I make about the regional analysis is that: Europe is the continent of Firefox; North America is the continent of Safari (about 10%); South America is the continent of Chrome (near 22%!!); Russia and Ex-USSR countries like Opera very much! :-)

I think you have to take into account the "menu" of browsers that is available to EU Windows users. There's no way that Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc would be in any kind of position without that, I think.

I don’t think that’s the case. Taking the data at face value it’s even doubtful whether the browser ballot had any effect at all.

StatCounter shows a pretty steady decline of IE since July 2008 (that’s when their data starts), down to about 45% in March 2010 (that’s the month when the browser ballot came with a Windows update) from about 58% (that’s about 0.6% per month). Since March IE has lost 7.8 points (that’s about 0.8% per month). All that loss since March was at the expense of Chrome (Firefox and other browsers could merely hold their March level).

That decline was a bit more rapid than the past average, but that extended decline is nothing special and also not particularly steep (there have been eleven month of near constant decline between August 2008 and June 2009 at an average rate of about 1.1% per month).

Firefox had more than 36% of the browser share since December 2008. The browser ballot doesn’t seem to have helped it so at least Firefox is in the position it is without any help from the EU. Chrome might have been helped by the ballot but even that is doubtful. North America which didn’t get a browser ballot shows a similar rise of Chrome.

A superficial reading of the data doesn’t show any effects of the browser ballot. You might be able to tease effects out with more analysis but I would bet that those are miniscule.

IE is at insane levels in South Korea (94%)

I believe that's because all online banks don't use SSL/HTTPS, but instead some different encryption standard, which is only available as an ActiveX plugin, i.e. Internet Explorer only.

This is not really a truely free market where people can change.

It must have been a very compelling dog and pony show that Microsoft put on to get ActiveX mandated by law in South Korea.

Actually, it's because the Clinton administration made encryption protocols a type of munition, and didn't allow the export of any with more than 40 bits until 1999. OTOH, South Korean legislation didn't allow the use of 40 bit encryption for online transactions, so they commissioned the Korean Information Security Agency to create a 128 bit block cypher called SEED in 1998. At that time, ActiveX (IE) and NSPlugin (Netscape) were the only viable technologies for this purpose that would be available on all customers' computers. Now that Netscape's dead, only ActiveX is left.

In January 1999, RFC 2246 (128 bit SSL) was finalized and permitted for export, but by then SEED was already entrenched. It's only now that smartphones are starting to become popular that they're trying to change things: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2010/09/133_73601....

You can read Gen Kanai's post about it on the Mozilla Asia blog for more info: http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monocultu...

What if someone revived the NSPlugin and/or implemented SEED for Chrome and Firefox?

Significant changes have probably been made to the implementation since the NSPlugin implementation was dropped; the protocol may have become dependent on ActiveX-specific features/settings.

I don't know enough of the technical details to fully follow the discussion, but it looks like support might have been added to Firefox ("Status: RESOLVED FIXED"): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839

This commit definitely makes it look like something has happened: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/rev/653b75a8f4...

Firefox already has SEED for TLS in the crypto library we use (NSS). AFAICT, the problem now is mostly getting bank websites to change. I believe some Korean banks have indicated that they will start supporting the standard mechanism in addition to the ActiveX control.

People from Mozilla China have recently pointed out to me the crypto-related issues in China. My understanding is that you can make Firefox do what you need for Chinese banking but it requires unintuitive configuration and/or hard-to-get drivers. I am hoping that sometime this year we will make improvements to make smartcards plug-and-play on platforms (like Windows) that support it. This will be a nice benefit not only for Chinese users, but also for any other smartcard users.

Thanks for this, I had no idea. Do you have any more information about this, or links?

Same in China. All major banks require IE (6 in most cases. though 8 works most of the time), in addition to some stupid security USB keys that you have to insert into your machine to prove it's really you. Oh, of coz the drivers only works in Windows. Even Windows in virtual machines sometimes have trouble with these devices. You have to use a native Windows.

Another reason is the proliferation of pirated copies of Windows.

Life is extremely hard for Linux users. Less so for OS X, but occasionally you still need to dual boot.

Also, almost all of the korean free-to-play MMORPGs require IE to launch them from.

I wonder how well these figures follow MS Windows usage.

That just gave me a crazy idea: measure browser usage by company and use it for stock investing. Ie you could see how quickly they can adapt new technology and processes.

Some of the big banks may still run IE6 (certainly BoA/Merrill Lynch still did about a year ago).

That's one good reason not to give them your money - they have lousy IT practices.

Take a look at Indonesia, it's ridiculous - Firefox is at 79%, while Chrome is at 12% and IE is at 5%.

This makes me really happy, I was really afraid that Chrome would cannibalize usage from Firefox users, and even it does at a certain point, its really small compared to the users it takes from IE. ^_^

Why does it bother you if people switch from ff to chrome?

Because it's an open project that symbolizes the freedom of the Internet, besides from being a wonderful browser driven by passionate people from the company and the community.

Also, it's a matter of respect. The fight for an open web and liberation from microsoft tirany has made possible to have this huge network of knowledge that is changing the society from its basis, allowing truly free exchange of information and culture and an universal way of communicating with whoever you want.

I know chrome is better in many aspects, but represents the desires of a company that only wants to be richer. The open web google promotes it's just part of their expansion plan, and I need to remind me this each time I use their wonderful browser.

Sorry for extending but this topic always touches feelings

Chrome is 95% Chromium, and Chromium is open source as Firefox is! This is why I like them both! ;D

http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-projects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

Then use Chromium. Just as open source, and it's not like Android: Chromium development is public and anyone can work on it.

Corporate-land is still IE in the high percentages, including IE6. Hoping, wishing Chrome's new "ready for business" features will dent that...

I can confirm that many corporations still use IE6 for some reason. It's quite ironic how much the value security, but on the other hand let their employees use a 10 year old browser.

1) Incompetent/lazy/understaffed/broke IT departments that cannot or will not adopt a new browser policy

2) Draconian IT policies preventing workers from using non-approved software

3) Idiotic decision making from last decade to use ActiveX/some other IE6 only feature for some critical applications.

That's because most companies are not technology companies. They purchase all of their IT infrastructure instead of building anything in-house. So if the vendors they buy from only support IE6, their customers will be stuck with IE6 until the vendor decides to upgrade or their customers go with someone else.

It's worse. Most of the time the companies buy these locked in software, then the vendor goes AWOL and nobody can fix the mess, so they just try to stick to it until it horribly fails.

IE6 still has extended support with XP, but in a few years things will be very bleak for some of these companies.

But it's not all bad, some enterprises have a modicum of reason, solve the problem and at least try to avoid getting in the same mess again. At least that's the trend I perceive.

I think it's really important to remember this context too.

The results actually show that visitors to sites run by site counters customers show that distribution not that the internet as a whole see's that distribution too don't they?

On a site that I run for developers I see less than 1% IE, on a site that a customer runs that deals with many big corporates it's mostly IE and IE 6 at that. Unfortunately I don't think we'll be seeing the death of older browsers any time soon but in some contexts it's OK not to support them.

Thankfully is possible to install Google chrome without administrative rights and it takes all the settings from the IE for the proxies and that stuff.

Bless google for that...

Yeah but you have to be able to run non-approved exe's to do that and so many places still don't allow that.

Enterprise world...

In my job even the developer computers are really closed down, its really anoying

(Thanks vim for the not-administrative rights exe also :D)

Locking down my development machine would cause my resignation. I'm always amazed that people will put up with stuff like that.

you're important enough in you company to "resign"? most of us peons here have to make do with "quittng"

Thats right, I told my boss this is shit, and he answered me that its the way it is and cannot be changed per security reasons. He is anoyed too.

What he told me is that the system is designed for the normal users, so is as restricted as possible so that they cannot break it.

Since more and more developers have been joining the company this is becoming a really anoying issue, but nobody of the people who have enough power and could force a change cares about this stuff.

Personally, with my own custom system I would be very much productive, altough vim already boosted my productivity even being on windows (xp) ...

I would have thought the popularity of IE6 is not because of an advanced business features that Chrome can compete on, but is instead due to legacy OS, and legacy web applications that only work on IE6.

Some businesses are also using IE6 as a kind of a filtering system. For example, if Facebook Chat doesn't work on IE6, they only consider that positive.

Even if you're right and some companies do count this as a plus, I wouldn't touch that company with a ten foot pole. Why would anyone subject themselves to such extremist oligarchy in which you are forbidden from doing mostly anything that doesn't fit within some random business rules?

An "IE6 compatibility mode" for Chrome anyone? That would be the last hurdle for corporate adoption. Now that's what I call "low barrier of entry"!

Interesting... an opt-out-per-site rather than opt-in-per-site version of Chrome Frame.

An "IE6 compatibility mode" for Chrome anyone?

Easy, all you have to do is reproduce the entireity of IE6 in Chrome. Every little undocumended feature, quirk and difference. And it's all a black box cause IE6 is closed source. Good luck with that. :P

Couldn't they just use something like the IE tab extension (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hehijbfgiekmjfkf...)

I'd like to see Google providing aggregated browser stats from the data it collects via Analytics.

This post title should be: "Firefox overtakes IE in Europe (thank you Chrome!)"

I guess this could mean the enforced browser ballot is having a large effect on the market? It would be nice to see growth rates compared between regions.

If you take their data at face value, IE plateaued in late 2009, early 2010 after a long downward trend (from nearly 60% down to about 45%) in Europe. IE’s share only started to go down again in April and from then on slowly but steadily dropped to its current low level. That could support your hypothesis. The browser ballot came with a Windows update that was delivered on March 17 2010.

The only problem I see is that the current downward trend is nothing special if you zoom out a bit. As I already said, that plateau was preceded by a long downward trend. 2008 and 2009 look just like 2010. (StatCounter has no data from before July 2008.) IE has been steadily losing browser share for a long time.

I’m consequently not ready to make any definitive statements about the effects of the browser ballot.

Does this mean the Europeans are smarter? Can't be ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com