Stuck at a negligible share of the browser market, Opera has filed a formal complaint with the European Union Antitrust Commission pointing to the bundling of Internet Explorer into Windows, as the reason for what it referred to as a lack of consumer choice. But Firefox seems to have no problems growing from under Internet Explorer and, furthermore, dislodging large chunks of IE's audience and converting them to open source. In Europe, Firefox is in fact the author of a veritable IE onslaught. The massacre is restricted to a shift in audience, but on some European markets, Firefox is on the verge of overtaking IE and becoming the dominant browser.

The latest statistics provided by Internet metrics company XiTi for Europe bear
nothing but ill news for Microsoft. (Be advised, I performed the translation for myself, and my French is a tad rusty, soo...) "After a period of stagnation from June to September 2007, the market share of Mozilla Firefox experienced another growth in the majority of the European markets covered by XiTi, toward the end of the year. In this manner, in 2007, Firefox's market share increased a total of 5%, reaching 28% in December 2007," XiTi revealed.

According to the data provided by XiTi, Firefox increased its market share in approximately 90% of all European countries in 2007. As you can see from the adjacent image, even though it is in French I trust that you will manage to recognize the countries and the adjacent percentages without any problems, Firefox's market share is 45.4% in Finland, with 44.6% in Slovenia, 42.4% in Poland, 41.2% in Slovakia, and 40.3% in Hungry.

On the markets mentioned above, Firefox enjoys a market share of over 40%. But considering the overall European picture, the open source browser is still trailing Internet Explorer. IE accounts for a total of 66.1% of the EU browser market, while Firefox is just at 28%. Still, at the current level of growth, and with Firefox 3.0 dropping almost a year ahead of Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla has quite a healthy chance at becoming no. 1 with Firefox, at least on some EU markets.