Firefox claims 30 per cent market share

Mozilla has claimed that Firefox's market share is somewhere near 30 per cent, in the first of a new series of reports.

The new State of the Internet Report gathered up stats from several alanlytics firms, showing Firefox had the best market share in Europe, with 39.2 per cent, with North America rounding out the bottom at just over a quarter (26 per cent).

Actually, that's not entirely true. It turns out Antarctica is Firefox-friendly, as the Mozilla browser has an 80 per cent market share of the thousand or so residents.

Over the past quarter, Russia saw the most growth, posting a 20 per cent leap in the number of users.

"Although it may merely represent correlation, we did see a slight increase in Firefox downloads at the same time Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's chairperson, visited Russia in February," the report said.

Mozilla noted that the average user had two or three tabs open during a browsing session, but one lunatic worked away with 600 open tabs.

The report also looked at personalising the browser. About two per cent of users in Asia and Africa used add-ons, with 1.5 per cent of Europeans doing the same.

Those shivering down in Antarctica really love add-ons, with four per cent using the apps and widgets to personalise their browsing.

"It is a small sample size however, we have seen 538 add-on downloads since January by people in Antarctica - versus a total continent population of ~1,000," the report said.

Themes - which Mozilla calls Personas - were best loved in South America, with over a fifth of users installing them.

Mozilla said it would start releasing the report every quarter.