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It’s been a long, long time coming, but that hateful Internet Explorer has finally been knocked off the number one spot by it’s closest competitor, Firefox, in Europe. At least according to one source. StatCounter, who keep tallies on such things as browser usage and numbers of jellybeans in large jars, are reporting that Firefox registered 38.1% usage in December, while IE lost out by a nose at 37.5%.

So who do Firefox have to thank for this momentus achievement? Well, none other than their other competitor, Chrome. While Firefox’s usage has been largely flat, Chrome has slowly been chipping away at Internet Explorer’s userbase to the point that it has been pushed into second place. Chrome itself registered a 14.6% share, up almost 10% from the same period last year.

What’s interesting, aside from the dethroning, is that in North America Internet Explorer still holds a lead of around 22% (according to StatCounter’s numbers) over Firefox. So what could be causing the discrepancy? Could it be us cappuccino-sipping Europeans are simply more sophisticated surfers? More likely, we’re finally seeing the effects of the infamous European Commission-imposed “Browser Choice” dialogue.

Following a ruling by the EC in December 2008 which deemed that Microsoft was acting anti-competitively (essentially using the dominance of Windows to push their browser onto users who weren’t aware there was a choice available), the OS giant was forced to offer users a choice between competing browsers – basically giving it’s competitors a voice within the Windows ecosystem.

At the time of the ruling Internet Explorer had around 54% of the market, and was almost 20% clear of Firefox. It would seem the ruling worked, as the much-loathed browser has now finally been displaced by a superior competitor. See, sometimes governance does work! Now if only they could do something to fix this pesky recession…

(If anybody knows who to credit for this image, please let me know, because it’s awesome!)