According to this VUnet post, the Firefox market share for Europe as a whole is now over 20% and some countries are well over 30%.
If you haven’t tried the Firefox web browser yet, you might want to give it a go, whatever operating system you’re using.

Bruce Schneier drew my attention to a fascinating piece of research on the relative insecurity of different web browsers. He summarises the findings thus:
The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were “known unsafe.” Their definition of “known unsafe”: a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been […]

Microsoft is taking rather a while to patch the latest (rather serious) Windows security hole, to the extent that experts are recommending a third-party patch.
If Santa didn’t bring you an alternative to your Windows machine, you might want to read more info here.