Locaweb Blog

ReadWriteWeb‘s Audrey Watters reports, citing a StatCounter report, that Firefox is now the #1 browser in Europe.

The shift is largely due to the growth of Chrome, which has been stealing users from IE, rather than to Firefox user base growth. Firefox now dominates 38.11% of the European market, with IE trailing at 37.52% and Chrome a distant (but growing) third at 14.58%.

Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s CEO, says this is likely the impact of one of the action Microsoft took as part of their anti-trust settlement with the EU, which implements a browser choice screen in Windows 7. Called a “Browser Ballot”, this screen must give users their choice of browsers, which are displayed in random order to be as neutral as possible.

The fact is that, ballot or no ballot, Chrome grew 187% in market share in the period between December 2009 and December 2010. The browser war is far from over, and as usual, Google is in the spotlight as the protagonist of yet another rupture.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens as more and more users go mobile, especially with Android (there goes Google again!) growing as it has been growing this last year. This is especially true considering another report by Audrey Watters at the ReadWriteWeb, stating that by 2015, one third of US consumers will be tablet users.

Even though Internet Explorer still comfortably dominates the US market at 48.92% of users, the adoption of mobile internet access might change this balance, especially since Microsoft has yet to hit home with its mobile offerings.

Check out the image below to see exactly what this Android growth represents in Europe.