Popular browsers around the world

Yesterday we announced on Twitter that according to some stats, Firefox 3 just became the most popular browser in Europe. This is great news for the web-development industry and for Propeople in particular, as we are a full service creative web agency. We are looking forward for users to use browsers that support all coding standards. Also, we already explained why we want to get rid of IE6.

We looked deeper into statistics to see what browsers are used in different countries and parts of the world. Here is what we came up with.

First, we discovered there are big differences in browsers usability in different part of the world. Europe is on the edge between Firefox 3 and IE7, North America is dominated by IE7 and Asia is deep into IE6 and IE7.

Second, users from different European countries prefer different browsers. For instance, in Denmark over 55% of users prefer IE7, and only about 20% use Firefox 3. We found quite the same picture in Netherlands (IE7 – 58%, FF3 – 19%), Norway (IE7 - 52%, FF3 - 23%), France (IE7 - 52%, FF3 - 27%), UK (IE7 - 49%, FF3 - 24%), Sweden (IE7 – 48%, FF3 - 23%), Italy (IE7 - 43%, FF3 - 28%).

On the opposite side, there are countries where users prefer FF3 over IE7. These countries are Germany (FF3 - 54%, IE7 - 22%), Finland (FF3 – 47%, IE7 – 29%), Poland (FF3 – 44%, IE7 - 20%), Switzerland (FF3 – 40%, IE7 – 35%), Romania (FF3 - 38%, IE7 - 21%), Bulgaria (FF3 - 35%, IE7 - 25%) and Czech Republic (FF3 – 41%, IE7 – 26%).

Overall, it seems internet users in Central and Eastern European countries mostly prefer Firefox 3, while Western Europeans like IE7.

Third, there is almost no difference in browser preferences in USA and Canada. In both countries, users prefer IE7 over FF3. However, recently Firefox 3 started to gain more ground in the US.

Finally, Asia surprised us the most. It’s incredible that Chinese (57%), South Korean (44%) and Indian (41%) users choose to browse the web using IE6. In Japan, IE7 is the most popular browser (42%), followed by IE6 (22%) and FF3 (21%). The opposite, in Indonesia and Philippines the most popular browser is Firefox 3.

We were amazed to discover a totally special case in Kazakhstan, where the most popular browser is Opera 9.6 (23%), followed by Firefox 3 (20%), IE7 (18) and IE6 (13%).

In conclusion we can certainly say there are big differences in browsers’ popularity in Europe, North America and Asia. Moreover, there are significant differences between countries within the same part of the world. Indeed, when developing a web product for a specific country, it is totally useful to observe browsers usage stats and trends in that country... because they are all different.

Data from gs.statcounter.com