AdTech AG, a German advertising company, has just published a browser market share study for Europe. The results are quite similar to what has been previously published by French firm Xiti Monitor (especially when you know that they count all Gecko-based browsers as Firefox, and that the measures are done on a Sunday, when Firefox usage is higher than during weekdays, by a margin of 2 to 3 percentage points).
Here are ADTech's numbers, straight from the press release:
| Europe | Finland | Germany | UK | France | Denmark | Italy | |
| IE 6.x | 80.08 | 69.67 | 67.72 | 81.92 | 81.13 | 89.16 | 86.62 |
| Firefox | 10.11 | 20.69 | 15.54 | 6.72 | 9.33 | 5.88 | 3.80 |
| IE 5.5 | 2.68 | 1.80 | 2.99 | 3.72 | 3.44 | 1.40 | 3.55 |
| IE 5.0 | 2.34 | 1.77 | 2.21 | 2.76 | 3.14 | 1.20 | 3.76 |
| Apple WebKit | 1.34 | 0.69 | 1.27 | 1.54 | 1.17 | 1.12 | 0.84 |
| Mozilla 1.x | 1.05 | 1.22 | 2.28 | 0.63 | 1.04 | 0.51 | 0.74 |
| Opera 7.x | 0.74 | 1.35 | 4.83 | 0.21 | 0.14 | 0.12 | 0.20 |
| Netscape 7.x | 0.60 | 1.08 | 1.26 | 0.48 | 0.40 | 0.20 | 0.33 |
| Opera 8.x | 0.47 | 1.25 | 1.10 | 0.14 | 0.07 | 0.23 | 0.07 |
I remember when, back in October 2004, just before the Firefox launch. Bart Decrem (then in charge of Marketing for Mozilla Foundation) and I were doing press briefings in Europe. Then Bart said something like "We expect Firefox market share to be around 10% by 2005". I tried not to show it, but I promise I started sweating like never before. How foolish it sounded back then, the AdTech and Xiti numbers show us it's now reality!
But let's get back to our numbers. One could count these browsers by rendering engine (as Mozilla 1.x, Netscape 7.x and Firefox 1.0 are very similar in terms of rendering, thanks for using the same Gecko engine), rather than versions nor brands. So there are the figures:
| Europe | Finland | Germany | UK | France | Denmark | Italy | |
| IE 6.x | 80.08 | 69,67 | 67.72 | 81.92 | 81.13 | 89.16 | 86.62 |
| Gecko | 11.76 | 22.99 | 19.08 | 7.83 | 10.77 | 6.59 | 4.87 |
| Apple Webkit | 1.34 | 0.69 | 1.27 | 1.54 | 1.17 | 1.12 | 0.84 |
| Opera 7.x and 8.x | 1.21 | 2,6 | 5.93 | 0.35 | 0.21 | 0.35 | 0.27 |
| Obsolete IE (5 and 5.5) | 5.02 | 3.57 | 5.20 | 6.48 | 6.58 | 2.60 | 7.31 |
The very good news for those who appreciate clean HTML code and CSS-based layout, is is that around 95% of browsers in Europe (including IE 6.x) have decent standard support through Doctype switching. This is another piece of great news!
Oh, I think I should mention that this post was 
