ADTECH Analysis Unveils Firefox Market Share as High as 30 Per Cent Across Europe

HELIOS IQ identifies the top trends across EMEA.

Frankfurt, Germany, March 20, 2007 – ADTECH, a leading provider of ad server technology has today announced the results of its latest browser analysis research. New figures show that almost one third of online users in Germany favour Firefox and across Europe overall, the average market share for the open-source browser has now reached almost 15 per cent. ADTECH determined the distribution of browsers in individual countries as part of a major recent study into web browser market share.

"Firefox has reached a total Europe-wide market share of almost 15 per cent, but the usage varies dramatically across individual European countries," says Dirk Freytag, CEO of ADTECH. “It seems the Germans and the Finns in particular share a love of Firefox. More than 30 per cent of German web surfers and 28 per cent of all Finnish users are navigating the Internet with the open-source browser. In contrast, less than seven per cent of users in Denmark are navigating with Firefox.”

The ADTECH study also revealed that following the introduction of Firefox 2.x in October 2006, Firefox 1.x experienced a loss in market share similar to those previously suffered by Microsoft’s IE. Since December 2006 however, the Mozilla product has shown one per cent growth.

During recent months, Internet Explorer 7.x has also seen a strong resurgence. Only four months after its introduction in November 2006, one in four Europeans is now using IE 7.x. The usage of this most recent Microsoft browser is particularly strong in France and Britain, where more than 30 per cent of users in both countries are online with IE 7.x. These increases have cannibalised the most popular existing browser, IE 6.x., which lost more than 20 per cent in the same period.

Overall, the shift away from IE continues. Since the launch of Firefox, Microsoft has been losing more and more market share to browser competition. Due to the inability of IE 7.x to compensate for the losses of other browser versions, the total IE market share of 77 per cent is significantly below the 80 per cent threshold. At the end of 2004, it had been above 90 per cent.

For its regular browser analyses, ADTECH evaluates several billion banner enquiries across Europe to its own Adserver. The present data was collected between November 2006 and February 2007 from 4,000 Web Sites.

Browser distribution and click rates can vary according to Web Site, day of the week and time of day. ADTECH wants to use its browser analyses to show trends, rather than determine the absolute figures.

Browser-distribution by country for February 2007 (in %):

Browser	Europe-wide	Germany	Finland	UK	France	Italy	Denmark
IE 6.x	50.86	43.66	39.59	55.00	49.02	59.60	65.04
IE 7.x	25.87	21.36	27.35	29.62	31.92	24.03	22.85
Firefox 1.x	6.09	10.28	12.62	4.83	7.45	4.58	3.07
Firefox 2.x	8.25	19.35	15.66	5.80	8.37	6.68	3.88
Mozilla	5.11	0.90	0.44	0.22	0.34	0.84	0.44
AppleWebKit	1.63	2.03	1.26	2.29	1.51	2.22	2.08
Opera 8	0.85	1.69	1.96	0.51	0.29	0.42	1.21
IE 5.x	0.61	0.97	0.43	0.77	0.90	1.25	0.27

Graphical view click here...

Developments in browser distribution in Europe (in %):

	Nov 2006	Dec 2006	Jan 2007	Feb 2007
IE 6.x	72.24	62.02	54.65	50.86
IE 7.x	4.90	15.13	22.13	25.87
Firefox	13.41	13.76	14.05	14.34
Mozilla	5.18	4.60	5.30	5.11
AppleWebKit	1.56	1.48	1.61	1.63
Opera 8	0.78	0.78	0.82	0.85
IE 5.x	0.85	0.70	0.68	0.61

Graphical view click here...


ADTECH Press Contact UK
Nikki Alvey, The PR Network
Phone: +44 (0) 7973 354 706


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