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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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?
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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 released the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research conducted on the first of August into opinions on Smartphones. They interviewed 331 members of their monitor group, 58.3% male, by means of a private internet survey. 13.9% were in their twenties, 36.3% in their thirties, 29.3% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 7.6% in their sixties. Note that JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor group seems to have a disproportionately high number of business people, so the results should be read in that light, so the knowledge and usage of Smartphones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) is probably higher than in a truely random sample.

Despite, or more likely because, standard phones in Japan having very high specification level, the market for Smartphones seems very limited. There have been a few models released, but they have a niche market and are rarely promoted in the high street shops. I’m surprised a full QWERTY keyboard came so low in the ranking, but perhaps people were imagining that only pinkie-sized could be squeezed into a mobile. However, I still have fond memories of my Psion Series 5 (I lost it in Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam) and its amazing mini keyboard. Something like that with BlueTooth support for a voice headset would be wonderful. Anyone know where to buy a second-hand Psion in Japan?
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