Month: December 2007

Categories
main mozilla tech

Central Europe marketshare situation – short analysis (part 1 / Poland)

The first part of this summary focuses on Poland. (part 2 – Czech Republic, part 3 – Hungary, part 4 – Lithuania, part 5 – Ukraine)

 

Flag of Poland

Poland

 

Population: 38.5 mln
Internet users: 11.4 mln (29.9%)

In case of Poland we can present two datasets (as this is the data we have from Ranking.pl) – users of the Polish Internet who come from Poland and users who come from outside of Poland.

The emigrants group is important because it brings us the numbers that should be near to Western Europe/US numbers while still in Gemius methodology.

Poland has very stable, big and well organized community lead by two projects. MozillaPL is a community project focused on self support, community activities, extension localization, and is an amazing source of energy. Aviary.pl is much smaller, task oriented group, that is considering itself as fully professional localization team, with a clear entry barrier, rules, internal structure and growing set of projects under its guide. It started as a part of MozillaPL with a goal to provide high quality localization of Firefox and Thunderbird, but now, it localizes big variety of products both commercially and non-commercially.

 

cenatrleurope-graph1

First, let’s take a look at the current market share of the most important browsers.

Yes, in contrast to the situation in western Europe, America and Asia, Opera does exists on our market and has its share, while Safari (0.1%) and the whole Mac platform are hardly visible.

Looking at the graph on the right, you can see the latest cumulative set with Microsoft Internet Explorer keeping the crown with 59.5% of the market share, Firefox being second with 33.3% and Opera being third with 5.8%.

In terms of engines, Gecko has 34% and MSIE has just dropped below 60% (59.9%) point.

 Yes. The results are different to the ones from XiTi Monitor. According to what we know, XiTi measures websites in English, French and Spanish, so they’re most representative in western Europe. For other countries they measure users from those regions who connect to the tracked websites, which distorts the results.

  Now, let’s take a look at users from outside of Poland (29% in this group is from England, 16% Germany, 14% USA, 27% other European countries, 14% rest of the world):

Continue reading “Central Europe marketshare situation – short analysis (part 1 / Poland)”

Categories
mozilla tech

Central Europe marketshare situation – short analyze (part 0)

My recent focus is on browsers situation in Europe. Especially non-western europe.  It means pretty big area with tons of countries, languages and home-grown Internet booms in the middle. I’d like to share some basic data about 5 of those basing on the data from Gemius.

Gemius is a polish company that focus on Internet statistics, profiling users for websites etc. What is good for us, is that the company is presenting weekly their merged results for “whole polish Internet” on the website ranking.pl. Which gives everyone in Poland pretty good idea on what’s going on here.

Some time ago Gemius expanded to new markets – Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine. Another thing is that due to the rising problem of “cookie deletion” the ambitious methodology of tracking “visits” had to be shifted into “tracking page views”, and I want to present you the summary of this data in case of web browsers that I think is representative for those countries and this part of Europe (1).

In the next posts I’ll be analyzing each of the countries and in summary, I’ll present the combined data for the whole region.

1) To explain why I tend to assume that Gemius data for Poland is a good estimation for population, let me show same data.
According to InternetWorldStats, Poland has around 11,5 mln Interent users. According to last Gemius weekly stats before they changed the methodology (May 2007) they tracked 19 296 045 visits during the week.
Even if we assume it’s not 100%, it’s still pretty good sampling, especially as my goal is not to measure the amount of users, but the market share trends.
For Czech Rep., InternetWorldStats says they have 5.1 million users, and Gemius in May tracked 8 million visitors during the week.
For Hungary, IWS says about 3 mln users, and Gemius tracked 3.6 mln visits.
For Lithuania, IWS says about 1.2 mln users, and Gemius tracked 1.3 mln visits
For Ukraine, IWS says about 5.3 mln users, and Gemius tracked 1.2 mln visits.
Usually, one user is doing far less than 3 visits per week which means that you can divide the visits by 3 and get estimated real users. Comparing IWS Internet users to those real users will give you a sampling.
In all those cases, beside Ukraine, we can say that it’s very representative sampling. In case of Ukraine, I still tend to believe that it’s enough to get some idea on what’s going on there.
please, bear in mind, that those are statistics. Statistics are a way to represent the data, and data represents reality. On each level there are simplifications and mistakes, and it’s up to you to decide on your own how far you trust the summary results.

Categories
mozilla po polsku tech

Tak się robi historię…

Przepis jest prosty, bierzesz historię i ją robisz. Korzystając z faktu, że Tobie zależy na pewnej jej wersji bardziej niż innym, nie napotykasz raczej oporu, skutek jest wszystkim.

Ostatnio często mówi się o “poprawianiu Wikipedii“. Jak wiadomo, Wikipedia nie jest doskonała, i można ją poprawić. Nasz wewnętrzny dysonans poznawczy wręcz marzy o takiej okazji zewnętrznej racjonalizacji naszych przekonań, decyzji i wyborów.

Niestety nawet na naszym, małym, podwórku przeglądarek internetowych nie każdemu udało się oprzeć tej pokusie “wykreowania” kawałka historii.

Continue reading “Tak się robi historię…”
Categories
mozilla tech

Microsoft ignores the lesson and keeps being simply rude

So… there is this huge network of the world called the Internet. And there is a protocol called HTTP which is a base of communication for pretty popular WWW.

Many years ago, Microsoft has prepared pretty good browser – Internet Explorer, that stormed the market. It was really good product, IE4 was the best at the time. Their marketshare rocketed up and around 2002 they have had between 90 to 98% of the Internet browser market share. That’s pretty a lot!

So. After IE6 released in 2001, the company released the team that was working on it, and left the product hardly maintained with no plans for future development. The market was theirs. The tool for using WWW was in their hands. From the economical point of view, their decision was reasonable. Cut the costs. Goal was achieved.

But the missing element is the altruistic theory – “consumer matters”. And consumer does not erase his needs once you have the marketshare taken. Really. But for Microsoft, for some reason, this equation worked.

For the next 6 years, each and every user of the Internet was forced to use IE6, because the WWW network was compatible with this web browser, and there was no upgrade on a horizon.

Continue reading “Microsoft ignores the lesson and keeps being simply rude”
Categories
flock main tech

Flock 1.0 in 6 languages!

As Stef wrote, we have finally released first locales of Flock 1.0 to the public!

Spanish (for spain and latin america), Finnish,  Polish, Russian, Slovak are available for users!

We’re working on the next round that should contain some of those from Flock 1.0 L10n status.

If you want to help with those, or start a new localization for Flock, read this 🙂