世論 What Japan Thinks

I haven’t seen any statistics on browser use in Japan for a while, so I was glad to get this data from goo Research via japan.internet.com on browsers.

Demographics

Between the 25th and 17th of November 2010 1,091 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.7% of the sample were male, 16.6% in their teens, 18.0% in their twenties, 21.1% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, and 12.4% aged sixty or older.

Looking at worldwide statistics on browser usage Internet Explorer is on 52%, Firefox on 26% and Chrome on 11%, but these figures are based on actual page views, so it’s difficult to make a direct comparison. I was also suprised to see that only 13% here have a recommended browser at work or school, although some people might have locked-down PCs so they cannot actually make a change themselves.

You’ll note that this survey was collected on the web, yet 6.4% of the sample (70 people) said they knew what a browser was but didn’t use one… Just as well that they were eliminated from the follow-up question!
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Here’s a great survey from iShare, looking at the potentially rather dull subject of search engines, but by examining the relationship between usage patterns and browser choice they uncover interesting trends.

Demographics

Between the 29th of June and the 2nd of July 2010 474 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.6% of the sample were male, 27.4% in their twenties, 34.2% in their thirties, and 38.4% in their forties.

I feel that the CLUB BBQ demographic tends to be more technical than the average user, and that is perhaps reflected in the choice of search engine in Q1SQ3 where Google beats Yahoo! by a factor of three to one, despite other surveys with a wider demographic spread indicating that Yahoo! is a few points ahead of Google.

I use Opera and use its built-in toolbar to search Google. I’ve heard from a few people that Bing is actually worthwhile trying out, but when I’ve tried it out it very cleary biases my search towards Japan-located and Japanese-language results and I don’t know how to tell it to take a more global view.
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A recent survey from Marsh Inc, reported on by japan.internet.com, into web site viewing habits showed that very few people have discovered the joy of RSS.

Demographics

Between the 3rd and 7th of March 2010 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was 50:40 male and female, 2.3% in their teens, 17.7% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

Even my mother’s worked out how to access my RSS feed, so I don’t know why the figure is so low in Japan. However, it might have something to do with 68.7% having a news or portal as their home page, neither of which really suit RSS readers.

Personally, I don’t really know how many web sites I’ve got set up in Google Reader, but it’s probably close to 40. The first page I access is usually my stats page for this site!
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This recent survey from iShare into web browsers contains some fascinating and surprising data on preferences amongst a quite experienced sample of internet surfers.

Demographics

Between the 14th and 17th of December 2009 468 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 57.3% of the sample were male, 33.3% in their twenties, 34.6% in their thirties, and 32.1% in their forties.

As you can see from Q1, most of the sample have over 10 years of web use under their belts, yet although one associates Internet Explorer with newbies and Firefox with experts, the data shows Explorer about a third ahead of Firefox.

Sleipnir is basically a new skin for Internet Explorer, but it does seem quite popular in my office, and Lunascape is a three-in-one Internet Explorer plus Firefox plus Google Chrome/Safari.

Of course, Opera is the best web browser by far.
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I looked at RSS feed usage yesterday and expressed surprise at the relatively low level of usage, but this new survey from JR Tokai Express Research Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into web site viewing habits reveals perhaps that there is not much need for RSS.

Demographics

On the 4th of September 2008 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor pool who used the internet at home completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.6% of the sample were male, 3.3% in their teens, 11.8% in their twenties, 30.5% in their thirties, 24.5% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, 8.5% in their sixties, and 5.7% in their seventies or older.

I was going to quote similar figures on site usage from the UK or USA, but I couldn’t find anything useful through Google! If someone knows of a “What the UK/USA Thinks”-like web site, please let me know.

Although there are few people performing their regular site checks through RSS, with the majority having no more than five places to visit, RSS is perhaps not that necessary. However, do people start checking more sites once they learn about RSS, or do they keep the same number but just do their checks quicker? That would be an interesting topic for a survey.
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Recently japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into browser start pages, in particular in this article, on settings on work computers.

Demographics

One the 16th of October 2007 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group who were employed in the private or public sectors completed a private online questionnaire. 83.1% were male, 10.6% in their twenties, 42.0% in their thirties, 33.8% in their forties, 11.8% in their fifties, and 1.8% in their sixties.

The official word is that my employers’ intranet works best with Internet Explorer, although I suspect that is code for “we can’t be bothered testing it with anything else”, and best is a relative term. Anyway, regardless of that, I use Opera as my primary browser as it is easy to switch off images and embedded Flash and other objects, not that I need to do that as I of course never ever visit any non-work-related sites. Actually, Opera 9 is banned because it contains a BitTorrent client which might spontaneously start spewing company secrets, or something. My start page is set to nothing at all, with my home browser set the same way. Internet Explorer is set to point to the intranet just because that’s what I mainly use it for.

Following some feedback on an earlier post, I’ve added in hyperlinks to SQs, as I’ve had at least two people mention my use of (to SQ) was confusing. I hope they help!
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I’ve never heard (as it were) of people surfing under voice control at work (excluding swearing at the browser for crashing or the internet for being slow, of course) but a recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on browsing at work showed that these sort of people do exist.

Demographics

On the 7th of June 2007 333 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor pool employed in private industry completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 70.9% of the sample were male, 10.5% in their twenties, 52.0% in their thirties, 29.1% in their forties, 6.0% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

Sadly there was no question asked (or at least not reported) on how much of the time was spent on work-related versus private-related activities. Our workplace strictly forbids private surfing.

Q2 is a bit confusing to answer regarding feed reading – does using services like Google Reader or Bloglines count as using a feed reader? Therefore, I find the figures in that table a bit unreliable. I also wonder why so many people don’t know how they are surfing.
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Today, japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into browsers installed on corporate computers. 330 people from their monitor pool employed in private or public enterprises successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 80.0% of the sample was male, 12.4% in their twenties, 42.1% in their thirties, 30.9% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

The figures for Internet Explorer are spectacularly high. Dropping those with no browser or no computer and the don’t knows, almost 98% of users may be running IE, and even including all the don’t knows still leaves at best (or is it at worst?) just under 90% definitely with Internet Explorer. One reason, of course, is that many corporate intranet applications may require a specific browser, as my employer’s does. Note that Sleipnir is just an Internet Explorer shell, although Gen Kanai’s blog informs me that it can be switched to use the Firefox/Gecko engine instead.

For the open source Mozilla project, at best there are 54 identifiable users, or 18.9% of those who know their browser, but that is assuming that the Netscape, Firefox and Mozilla user groups do not overlap, and of course that the Netscape category doesn’t include people using a pre-open source 4.x (or even earlier!) version.
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japan.internet.com recently published a short survey on the usage of internet tools at home. There is a fuller survey report available at a price. They interviewed just 300 internet users, equally split between male and female, aged between 20 and 49 from all over the country, on the 20th of December 2005.

I’m an Opera and Becky! man myself.


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