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Figures released by Xiti Monitor reveal that Firefox is close to toppling Internet Explorer in countries such as Finland, where it enjoys a 45% market share, as well as Poland, Slovenia and Hungary where it also enjoys market share between 40% and 42%. In Western Europe, Germany leads the way with a 34% share.

While Firefox continues to grow, the figures reveal that Internet Explorer is still by far the dominant browser holding a 66.1% share of the worldwide market, as opposed to Firefox's 28%, which still represents

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a new high for the open-source browser.

Of the remaining browsers, Opera fares best with a 3.3% share, while Safari trails with only 2%.

The figure also suggest that while more than 90% of Firefox users are running Firefox 2, less than half of Internet Explorer users have made the leap from IE6 to IE7.

The figures are backed up by PC Pro's own visitor statistics for 2007, which reveal that around 59% of those that visited the site did so using Internet Explorer. 30% used Firefox, while the remaining 11% were accounted for by the remaining browsers.

Speaking to PC Pro last September, Mozilla Europe president Tristan Nitot gave his thoughts on why Firefox is so popular in Europe.

"In Poland, for example, economic development caused the internet to come later to a generation that weren't already dependent on Internet Explorer and they saw immediately that Firefox was a better option."