Web browsers used most in China; how this impacts online campaigns.
So I was going through my analytics account for our in-house project, and noticed something interesting – which web browsers are used most in China.
Why is this important? We’ll I see a lot of campaigns launched featuring the latest web technology, bells + whistles, etc – and it all looks great if you’re running the latest web browsers.
So here’s the rub – people don’t really update their browsers as much as you’d think. Taking some stats from BA’s in-house project – which is a pop-culture site with a very general focus on the youth market – we see some interesting stats that should be taken into consideration before your next super-2.0/3.0 website or ad campaign gets launched.
Internet explorer dominates the charts with a 81% market share, firefox comes in a distant second with 11.22%, and Chrome an even more distant third at 4.46%. Now this is all fine and dandy – until you look at the next graph below.
Internet 6.0 takes the top spot at 57% of all IE browsers. This is a big problem because IE 6 is ancient (circa 2001); it has a lot of compatibility issues with current technology, and is a general pain in css to deal with.
Regardless, many large scale online campaigns I’ve seen in China amazingly fail to address the IE6 issue – this leads to a pretty hefty chunk of the potential audience seeing a screwed up website, which then effect branding and quality of communications.
Jun 25, 2009 @ 06:26:30
2 reasons:
China has tons of pirated copies of XP. These can’t upgrade to anything past IE6. Therefore, everyone uses IE6, unless you buy a new laptop or something.
Developers don’t like when they have to develop for IE6. It’s too hard for such delicate intellectuals.
In addition, many Chinese websites are hard-coded to use IE6. Yesterday I tried and failed to order something online with Taobao, only to fail with IE8, Firefox, and Opera.
Jun 25, 2009 @ 07:02:19
@craig – i think I’m running fake xp as well (I bought real CN copy, but wanted EN lang XP, so they installed fake); however, I’m able to run all the latest web browsers. However, this is cause I also cracked the windows genuine notification copy protection system; which I’m guessing others haven’t done yet, and therefore cannot upgrade.
Jun 26, 2009 @ 00:24:28
This is a very significant issue for any website targeting China. I checked the stats for the Chinese language version of my site http://www.exploreshanghai.com/ditie/ and got very similar results: 93% IE, of which 57% are running IE6.
For tech-oriented English sites, its not unusual to see IE at less than 25%.
Jun 30, 2009 @ 08:25:37
Hi Rand, this is a very small but valuable finding.
Another point we can consider is a significant number of users are using 1024*768 resolution.
All these are important insights for agencies to build better user experience.