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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I read the results of an interesting survey into how many Japanese had downloaded the new Firefox 3 release. The executive summary is that 5.5% of a sample of Japanese internet users from all walks of life had downloaded on release day, the 18th of June, then another 5.8% have downloaded since. However, 70.3% were unaware of the release, but after being informed of it through this survey, just another 6.9% wanted to download it, but 62.9% didn’t know, suggesting that there is qite a significantly proportion of Japanese internet users who are ignorant of Firefox’s existence.

Demographics

On the 3rd of July 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.5% of the sample were female, 14.5% in their twenties, 35.2% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 14.2% in their fifties, and 5.8% in their sixties.

The full details of the survey may be found at the japan.internet.com’s report here.
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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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