Globally, IE is at insane levels in South Korea (94%) and China (90% of which IE6 is 54%), Firefox is doing well in the Philippines at 47% with Chrome following close behind at 34%.
I guess the key take away is, as usual, know your own market.
edit: I wish you could easily see the countries with IE above 50%, I was surprised to see that by these stats the US just dropped below this level, mostly thanks to a strong showing from Apple's Safari compared with the rest of the world.
I believe that's because all online banks don't use SSL/HTTPS, but instead some different encryption standard, which is only available as an ActiveX plugin, i.e. Internet Explorer only.
This is not really a truely free market where people can change.
Same in China. All major banks require IE (6 in most cases. though 8 works most of the time), in addition to some stupid security USB keys that you have to insert into your machine to prove it's really you. Oh, of coz the drivers only works in Windows. Even Windows in virtual machines sometimes have trouble with these devices. You have to use a native Windows.
Another reason is the proliferation of pirated copies of Windows.
Life is extremely hard for Linux users. Less so for OS X, but occasionally you still need to dual boot.
Actually, it's because the Clinton administration made encryption protocols a type of munition, and didn't allow the export of any with more than 40 bits until 1999. OTOH, South Korean legislation didn't allow the use of 40 bit encryption for online transactions, so they commissioned the Korean Information Security Agency to create a 128 bit block cypher called SEED in 1998. At that time, ActiveX (IE) and NSPlugin (Netscape) were the only viable technologies for this purpose that would be available on all customers' computers. Now that Netscape's dead, only ActiveX is left.
In January 1999, RFC 2246 (128 bit SSL) was finalized and permitted for export, but by then SEED was already entrenched. It's only now that smartphones are starting to become popular that they're trying to change things: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2010/09/133_73601....
Firefox already has SEED for TLS in the crypto library we use (NSS). AFAICT, the problem now is mostly getting bank websites to change. I believe some Korean banks have indicated that they will start supporting the standard mechanism in addition to the ActiveX control.
People from Mozilla China have recently pointed out to me the crypto-related issues in China. My understanding is that you can make Firefox do what you need for Chinese banking but it requires unintuitive configuration and/or hard-to-get drivers. I am hoping that sometime this year we will make improvements to make smartcards plug-and-play on platforms (like Windows) that support it. This will be a nice benefit not only for Chinese users, but also for any other smartcard users.
Significant changes have probably been made to the implementation since the NSPlugin implementation was dropped; the protocol may have become dependent on ActiveX-specific features/settings.
I don't know enough of the technical details to fully follow the discussion, but it looks like support might have been added to Firefox ("Status: RESOLVED FIXED"): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=478839
That just gave me a crazy idea: measure browser usage by company and use it for stock investing. Ie you could see how quickly they can adapt new technology and processes.
Great info, thanks. Before seeing this I was having a tendency to think of Europe, North America and Oceania as somewhat homogeneous WRT browser market share. While it seems the UK (and also Ireland[1]) does follow the other two regions, the rest of Europe is a different beast.
I love see statistics on StatCounter and I go often there, but i didn't see the Philippines!
The deduction that I make about the regional analysis is that:
Europe is the continent of Firefox;
North America is the continent of Safari (about 10%);
South America is the continent of Chrome (near 22%!!);
Russia and Ex-USSR countries like Opera very much! :-)
I think you have to take into account the "menu" of browsers that is available to EU Windows users. There's no way that Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc would be in any kind of position without that, I think.
I don’t think that’s the case. Taking the data at face value it’s even doubtful whether the browser ballot had any effect at all.
StatCounter shows a pretty steady decline of IE since July 2008 (that’s when their data starts), down to about 45% in March 2010 (that’s the month when the browser ballot came with a Windows update) from about 58% (that’s about 0.6% per month). Since March IE has lost 7.8 points (that’s about 0.8% per month). All that loss since March was at the expense of Chrome (Firefox and other browsers could merely hold their March level).
That decline was a bit more rapid than the past average, but that extended decline is nothing special and also not particularly steep (there have been eleven month of near constant decline between August 2008 and June 2009 at an average rate of about 1.1% per month).
Firefox had more than 36% of the browser share since December 2008. The browser ballot doesn’t seem to have helped it so at least Firefox is in the position it is without any help from the EU. Chrome might have been helped by the ballot but even that is doubtful. North America which didn’t get a browser ballot shows a similar rise of Chrome.
A superficial reading of the data doesn’t show any effects of the browser ballot. You might be able to tease effects out with more analysis but I would bet that those are miniscule.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-DE-monthly-201010-201012-...
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-GB-monthly-201010-201012-...
Globally, IE is at insane levels in South Korea (94%) and China (90% of which IE6 is 54%), Firefox is doing well in the Philippines at 47% with Chrome following close behind at 34%.
I guess the key take away is, as usual, know your own market.
edit: I wish you could easily see the countries with IE above 50%, I was surprised to see that by these stats the US just dropped below this level, mostly thanks to a strong showing from Apple's Safari compared with the rest of the world.