Mozilla recently made the latest edition, version 14, of its popular Firefox web browser available for users to download, bringing new features such as secure Google searches and native fullscreen support for Mac OS X Lion. Now, website monitoring firm Pingdom has taken a closer look at how popular the browser is around the world.

According to the latest figures (July 2012) from StatCounter, Google’s Chrome browser is in the lead within the tightly contested browser wars, obtaining 33.8% usage worldwide. Coming in a very close second is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) which with its 31.83%, whilst Firefox completes the top 3 getting 23.9% usage globally.

Nations where Firefox logs over 50% usage

Around the world though, Firefox still maintains a dominant position in 14 countries, most notably Cuba where the fox is utilised by 72.2% of the web surfing population. Pingdom pointed out that  
Cuba is a stronghold for Linux operating systems, which assists in boosting the Firefox browser usage rate in that country.

It would appear that Firefox is also the browser of choice for a lot of countries on the African continent. Eight of the 14 nations on the list are African states, with Cameroon (67.9%), Madagascar (60.8%) and Ghana (59.2%) leading the African Firefox charge.