Hamburg  - Firefox is eroding Internet Explorer's reign as the most popular internet browser. An online study conducted by marketing research firm Fittkau & Maass showed that 38.4 per cent of German-speaking internet users browse either with Firefox version 3. x or 2. x.

The Internet Explorer 7. x version accounted for 37.2 per cent of the same group, while the previous version, 6. x, had 16 per cent.

Apple's Safari is used by 3.2 per cent of the 105,000 survey participants. It was followed by Opera with 2.3 per cent and Google Chrome with 0.8 per cent. (dpa)