14 DAY TRIAL // The browser war is somewhat the opposite to the search engines war: it too features a favorite and an underdog, but unlike Google and Yahoo, the startup switch has not yet been made. It's where things are headed, definitely, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is slowly backing up from the ever rising Firefox that Mozilla brought on stage.
Europe is the place where the spikes at IE's feet start growing sharper, the Old Continent is pretty much looking like it will be majorly open source friendly in the pretty near future. This is something like the old Sisyphus story, who slowly pushed his boulder up the mountain, with the exception that when it gets there, Mozilla won't see its product plummeting.
The biggest rise happened in Finland, where Firefox saw 2007 bringing it some 45.4 percent of the Internet users browsing it. Poland, Slovenia and Hungary are coming in close, in their 40s as well, while Estonia, Greece, Lettland, Austria, Germany, Croatia and Romania have between 30 and 40 percent of their Internet community taking advantage of the open source browser. The data has been gathered by the French Internet traffic analysis company, XiTi Monitor. In Australia, the numbers are almost the same as in Europe, just a little further back, 31.7 percent on average compared to the EU's 34 percent share.
I don't know for sure, but I think that the deal Mozilla had with Google, to feature as the browser's homepage, helped as well. It was most definitely benefic for both companies, and it involved great experience exchanging going on. Another reason for its growth could be the communities that, as soon as a new version of Firefox hit the broadband, instantly began translating it into different languages (at the moment, 40, with several more in beta, according to Wired).