Firefox market share nears 29 percent in Europe, down in the US, finds study
Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser is more and more popular in Europe, hitting nearly 29 percent market share in March. It's also growing in popularity in New Zealand and Australia, where it reached 31.2 percent, according to web analytics company Xiti.
In North America, however, March saw Firefox drop 1 percent. No one seems to know why.
I suspect it's just a momentary blip, however, as Firefox has seen continued growth in market share over the past few years. There was a time that its growth might have been driven by ideology. Not any more.
No, Firefox increases in popularity now for one very simple reason: It's a better browser. The fact that it can increase at Internet Explorer's expense, despite IE coming pre-installed on 99 percent of computers sold, says something about Microsoft's increasingly tenuous hold on the desktop computer market.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
