Quote:Web browser Firefox garnered the highest market share in Europe in December, pushing Internet Explorer to the second spot, reveals a study.

"Firefox overtook Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to become the No.1 browser in Europe in December 2010... In December, Firefox took 38.11 per cent of European market share, compared to Internet Explorer's 37.52 per cent," website analytics firm StatCounter said today.

Once the most-used browser in many countries, Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) is facing stiff competition, especially from Google's Chrome.

In March last year, European Union's competition authorities and Microsoft had agreed to allow web users in the region to choose from many web browsers.

"This is the first time that IE has been dethroned from the number one spot in a major territory. This appears to be happening because Google's Chrome is stealing share from IE while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share," StatCounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen said in a statement.

"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 year," Cullen said.

In Europe, Google Chrome was in the third place with a market share of 14.58 per cent in December, data compiled by StatCounter's research arm StatCounter Global Stats showed.

The findings are based on data from a sample of over 15 billion page views per month, including those from North America, collected from a network of more than 3 million websites.

Since the beginning of March, Microsoft offered Europeans the option to choose from among 12 browsers on the more than 100 million old and new PCs that use its Windows software.

Globally, Internet Explorer's share slipped to 46.9 percent in December, while Firefox was at 30.8 percent and Google was at 14.9 percent, StatCounter said.