Firefox marches East

[Rubber Duck]

[mulligan]

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.

[Rubber Duck]

Thanks for that. Whilst, that doesn't really give us much insight on penetration levels in the wider community it does give us a good perspective on how amenable the Japanese would be on downloading and installing.

[rhys]

I still think that is a dubious report. The survey didn't verify the user's browser version so relied on self-reporting. A bunch of 40 year olds won't even know. IE7 penetration is probably 5% or so based on my own traffic stats from Japan.

[Rubber Duck]

Came across this info on the BBC about Firefox 3 and 4. Perhaps surprisingly they are claiming 500K downloads per day!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6528849.stm

[Rubber Duck]

Here are the daily and hourly graphs:




It would seem cumulative downloads of Firefox have reached 325 Million.

[Rubber Duck]

Compare with last quarter!



It looks like the game is well and truly on now. Microsoft will be fight for their lives shortly!