French Internet traffic analysis company XiTi has released data showing that Firefox is slowly increasing its market share over Internet Explorer. Their results are based on compiled data from 2007.
XiTi Monitor reports a worldwide browser share of 66.1% for Internet Explorer and 28% for Firefox. Opera has a 3.3% share and Safari 2%. Firefox usage is as high as 45.4% in Finland. You can take a look at the full statistics over on Wired’s blog.

But are these statistics any more useful than any other statistics. Opera says no.
Interestingly, XiTi’s map misses out several European countries where Opera claim their browser is popular.
From Opera’s blog:

People may not be aware of this, but Opera is doing pretty well in Russia. In fact, some Russian stats suggest that Opera may have more users than Firefox… Whether this is the case or not is not that important (and as we know, browser stats are highly unreliable), but it is rather interesting that this particular country is left out, as if it wasn’t part of Europe at all!

The important thing to realise about browser statistics is where they come from. XiTi’s data can only come from a small set of websites that use their services. Most statistical data will be skewed in some direction or another.

Take this website for example. In 2007 32.7% of visitors used Firefox. But this is a website for webmasters. They tend to be more tech savvy and so I would expect this site to have a higher proportion of Firefox users than, say Google.

So whenever you are relying on web browser statistics, bear in mind that the data you are using is probably (as Opera says) “crappy.”