As you may have read recently Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the most used browser in Europe, according to statcounter a free web analytics company.

“This appears to be happening because Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share,” – Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter chief executive.

Google Chrome is currently in third place (but not for long)  in Europe and has grown from 5.06% to 14.58% in the last year. I think in a year or two, Chrome and Firefox will be battling for first place with IE trailing them.

“We are probably seeing the impact of the agreement between European Commission competition authorities and Microsoft, to offer EU users a choice and menu of browsers from March last,” added Aodhan Cullen.

Microsoft has agreed to provide users with the option to choose different browsers beginning from March 2010, and unfortunately for them a large portion of the users simply didn’t go with Internet explorer. I don’t blame them, I personally don’t like IE, I prefer Firefox or Chrome as well.

However its a different story in North America, where IE still has a clear lead over the rest of the browsers with (48.92%) followed by Firefox (26.7%), Chrome (12.82%) and Safari (10.16%) according to statcounter.

Browsers in the MENA region

That being said I was interested in Finding out the stats for the browsers in the MENA region and here’s what I found:

Quick Look

Numbers from 7 countries around the MENA Region were collected which were: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Browsers:

• IE was the overall leader with approximately (42%), Firefox in second with (22%) Chrome in third with (10.5%), Opera in fourth with (1.5%) and Safari in fifth with (1.2%)
• Saudi Arabia and UAE, Both had the highest IE users with (73%) and (72%) respectively
• Algeria, Egypt and Morocco had the highest users of Firefox with (33%), (27%), (27%) respectively, these countries were also the countries with the lowest IE user penetration
• Jordan had the highest percentage of Chrome users at (15%)

Browser Versions:

• IE 8 came in first with (27.5%)… IE 6 came in second with (19%) and IE 7 in third with (18%)
• Firefox 3.6 had (12%) beating other versions of Firefox.
• Chrome 5.0 had (3%) beating other versions of Chrome.
• Algeria, Morocco and Egypt all had the IE 6 as their number 1 browser with (23%), (27%) and (24%) respectively. To paint a better picture for you that’s almost 8 million users (according to internet world stats)  still on IE 6. Which is, well, kind of backwards especially when you consider that a number of major websites and companies stopped supporting IE 6 including Facebook, Google and Apple.

Specific (Country Details)

Algeria

Egypt

Jordan

Lebanon

Morocco

Saudi Arabia

UAE

This one is not from the region, in fact I got it by accident but I thought it would be fun to post it, its Antarctica’s browser breakdown, Firefox is the most used browser, but what’s more surprising is that there are people in Antarctica using browsers categorized as other!

Let us know your comments

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Tags: battle of the browsers, browser users in the region, browser war, Browsers, Browsers in the MENA region, Browsers in the middle east, Chrome, chrome users in the MENA region, egypt, firefox, Firefox users in the MENA region, Firefox vs IE, google chrome, IE, IE users in the MENA region, internet explorer, jordan, morocco, mozilla firefox, opera, postaweek2011, Safari, saudi arabia, uae