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According to a review of European net activity conducted by comScore, the UK is home to the most active online population in Europe. Users, on average, spend almost the equivalent of a working week (34.4 hours) on the web each month.

And both the UK and its European counterparts also beat US users when it comes to online behaviour. On an average day in April this year, for example, there were 122 million Europeans aged over 15 online, compared to 114 million in the states.

Germany boasts the largest online population with 32.6 million web enthusiasts aged 15 or above, while the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries have the largest percentage (ranging

The average European logs on to the web from either home or work for just over 16 days a month, spending a total of 24 hours viewing 2,662 site pages, according to comScore's World Metrix study.

Countries with monthly usage figures (in terms of days) below the average include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland.

But the population in Sweden is 51 per cent above the European norm in terms of its appetite for web pages, with the average Swedish user viewing 4,019 online pages per month.

'This marks the first time we have released this detailed portrait of internet usage across the 16 countries, making these comparisons truly revealing,' said Bob Ivins, comScore Europe's managing director.

The research also discovered that Google is the number one internet favourite for 13 of the 16 countries analysed, followed by software giant Microsoft in most of the geographies. Yahoo ranked third most popular across Europe, even though it actually only made the top three list in Ireland, Italy and Spain.