Meanwhile, in France, Google and Microsoft crusade for traffic

While web sites operated by Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. ranked first and second in the volume of November Internet traffic in France, the Mozilla Organization showed the sharpest increase thanks to the launch of its Firefox web browser, comScore World Metrix reports.

Google led all Internet sites with 16.38 million unique visitors in November in France, up slightly from 16.34 million in November 2005, followed by Microsoft at 15.51 million unique visitors, up 1% from 15.39 million, says ComScore World Metrix, a service of comScore Networks Inc.

Mozilla’s November traffic in France grew 65% year-over-year to 2.5 million unique visitors, a rise driven largely by the late-October introduction of the Firefox browser, comScore says. Web site design experts say it’s important for online retailers to be aware of the use of Firefox, which renders web pages differently from the way pages are rendered through Internet Explorer.

Also showing sharp growth in November traffic was Dailymotion.com, a video-sharing site, where the number of unique visitors grew 31% year-over-year to 4 million.

The following are the top 10 sites in terms of French traffic volume for November 2006, including their number of unique visitors (in thousands) and their change over November 2005:

Google Sites: 16,383, 0%
Microsoft Sites: 15,511, 1%
France Telecom: 13,599, 1%
Iliad/Free.fr Sites: 12,289, 1%
Yahoo! Sites: 10,856, 0%
Groupe Pages Jaunes: 10,657, -1%
eBay: 10,282, 6%
Groupe PPR: 8,917, 6%
Groupe Aprovia: 7,636, 3%
Orbus Groupe: 7,223, 5%