A small survey done in Japan recently (Article is dated 5th March)
japan.internet.com recently published the results of some research conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into Internet Explorer v7.0. 330 members of their online monitor group employed in private industry were interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. Thanks to Gen Kanai at Mozilla Japan for prompting me to publish it!
Demographics
Of the 330 in the sample, 82.7% were male, 13.6% in their twenties, 4.0% in their thirties, 30.9% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.
As an Opera user myself, I am not overly impressed by Internet Explorer 7, and never use it except for the corporate internet (which actually doesn’t yet officially support version 7, and in fact I’m not supposed to have upgraded, but that’s another story!) and Windows Update.
It’s difficult to know how to interpret the degree of satisfaction in Q1SQ2. Are people comparing it with the previous version and just rating the new features, or are they considering the whole package?
Research results
First off, 90.3% of the sample, or 298 people, used Internet Explorer at home. This is only slightly lower than the installation rate in the Japanese workplace. These 298 were asked the following question.
Q1: Which version of Internet Explorer do you use at home? (Sample size=29
Internet Explorer 7 (to SQs) 27.9%
Internet Explorer 6 51.7%
Internet Explorer 5 4.4%
Internet Explorer 4 or earlier 0.3%
Don’t know 15.8%
Q1SQ1: Do you use the included RSS Reader in Internet Explorer? (Sample size=83)
Yes 27.7%
No 72.3%
Q1SQ2: How do you feel about Internet Explorer 7? (Sample size=83)
Satisfied 19.3%
A little satisfied 19.3%
It’s OK 45.8%
A little dissatisfied 7.2%
Dissatisfied 8.4%
The 13 dissatisfied users were asked why, and the two most popular answers were that connection errors frequently occurred, and that it was slow and crash-prone.