Royal Pingdom has a great write-up with some interesting statistics about browser usage, global region-by-global region. It kinda made me think about why adoption rates of browsers would differ in other regions than here in the US, at least on a proportional level of some kind.
AN OPINION FOLLOWS:
North America still favors the Internet Explorer. I’m not sure if that’s helping other countries regard us as no longer the ideological center of intelligence in the world, or just because Microsoft’s operating system is just shipped in high enough numbers to make marketing irrelevant. Chrome’s takeover of second place from Firefox however, seems to suggest the faster release cycle, in addition to Google’s clout, might be the better way to go ahead as far as garnering marketshare.
Europe, however, are adopting technologies that are of higher relevancy for the technological ecosystem or things that support multiple languages and input possibilities because unlike NA, there are more than two languages spoken in most other parts of the world. As Europe has been the proving ground for Mozilla’s modern browser approach, I can see how it excels here, if only my slim margins.
For the Asian region, Chrome adoption has been outstanding, no doubt due to its minimalistic nature and its display of their languages (clearly not based on the Latin alphabet). Likewise, in South America, the culture of Internet users prefer the more updated and relatively safe browser to navigate online with the boom that the culture is experiencing.
The African region takes to Firefox for performance reasons, largely. Sure the Latin alphabet is possibly not the preferred character set that would fit for the region as a generalization, but it handles Unicode in a decent enough way for it to be a major player. What’s more is that the performance of Firefox on low-power machine—say those that might run on a power supply that isn’t fixed—complements the machines that are in use there.
Oceania, then, might have the make up of a hybrid of the NA and Asian regions based on the large influence that Australia has and how much of a foil they are to their European cousins. Alas, they are still being dominated by Microsoft’s dodgy browser. I suppose IE is just the ‘that’ll do’ solution for them down there? Chrome is growing pretty fast, probably due to the rest of the nations in the region and language needs.
It’s reassuring to see that at least the rest of the world has moved on from a browser platform that updates once a year and perhaps four more times in a decade. I know we can do better here in the North American region, but I think that would mean we would have to remove Internet Explorer with fire because the upcoming version of IE might be a bit too integral in the upcoming tile-based UI of Windows 8.
