WebProNews

What, if anything, do you associate with Finland?  How about Slovenia and Poland?  Well, not to shut down whatever cultural research you were going to do, but we'd like to suggest "Firefox" as an answer; new research shows that the browser does especially well in these three countries.

Firefox's market share increased in all three places between November and December of 2007, reaching 45.4, 44.6, and 42.4 percent, according to XiTi Monitor.  The magical 50 percent doesn't seem too far off at all.

What's also interesting, though, is how widespread Firefox use is throughout Europe.  "Mozilla Firefox's use share, on average for a European country, is 28% in December 2007, i.e. +0.7 points compared with November 2007," reports XiTi.  And as you probably noticed, that's pretty close to one-third.

Microsoft can't be too pleased with these findings; they would appear to show that people are unhappy enough with Internet Explorer to go out and seek an alternative.  Granted, there are other explanations - maybe some large European corporation has secretly forced its employees to use Firefox - but we're not inclined to buy 'em.

So with that, we'll direct a hat tip to Iain Thomson, and for comparison's sake, note that XiTi pegs North America's usage of Firefox at 21.0 percent.