browser software
Tokyo, 2010.02.07
We're about to launch our new business, which aims to sell diamond engagement rings to the Japanese public solely via the Internet.
One of the interesting things about doing business on the 'net in Japan is that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6, a dismally buggy mess, is the number one browser by far. Most of the figures I've seen put that one version of "MSIE" at 50-60% of the market in this country. And it's borne out by the traffic I get to little emuu.net, where friends and family make up most of the visits. Here are the results from the past two years, discluding use by my wife and me as well as robots and irrelevant "hits" like thumbnails etc:
29.5 85,484 msie 6
19.9 57,646 msie 7
17.8 51,743 firefox/3
7.3 21,169 firefox/2
7.3 21,155 safari/5
I've recently reworked this site to make it work better in MSIE 6 (it now relies less on CSS and more on "table" tags, FFS) and even has an "ad" for better software (Firefox) at the bottom of the page. I can nag people on my own site. But I can't change the way that our shoppers use the 'net. So of course we've been testing our site with MSIE 6. We're just that dedicated! ;^)
