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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):

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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.

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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.

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mozilla tech

ZipWriter hits trunk

 Woho! Bug 379633 is fixed!

ZipWriter just has been included into trunk.

You may say it’s a small thing. Who cares? Opera, IE, Safari lives without it and you can rarely see users complaining that their browser lacks scriptable zipwriter, right?

Hah! Mozilla is a platform, not “a browser”. It *does* influence any effort towards Xul editors, Mozilla IDE’s and… L10n tool 😉

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Mozilla Europe reignites

As some of you may know, Mozilla Europe BoD have a Plan to rule the world. We don’t push it in hurry, as we all know that rather sooner than later you all will understand that it’s actally good for you and the mankind as a whole.

Our current roadmap is to get more power after next elections in most European countries and slowly get people aware that our intelligence, brilliant ideas, and by far most importantly – incredible handsomeness – makes us the natural solution to all problems of the modern Europe.

Of course we’re not going to lay on our huge sofas and drink wine waiting for combined human intelligence (extelligence) to mature enough to see this obvious truth. We need to act.

The logic is simple. The blocker of our Ultimate Goal is human knowledge, maturity and awareness what’s good for you. We need to push this in the only right direction.

In order to achieve this goal we decided to meet together on 17th-18th of September and update our plan. We need to speak lauder (since we have perfect, radio-ready voices). We need to do more (since everything we do is good). We need to be more visible (since we’re amazingly handsome).

It happened, that the group of perfect, hot, well build half-gods met together as a European Mozilla affiliate and we feel responsible for the future of the Mozilla project. So the side effect of taking control over the world (for it’s own luck) will be good for Mozilla project itself.

We want you all, our community, developers, users, non-users, readers, and other kinds of BoD fans to raise your hands now, and share your thoughts, feelings, wishes and the words of thankfulness in the Wiki article.

Look at my beautiful eyes, reader. I’m speaking to you. It’s really important. What you will write there will really influence the future of Mozilla Europe (and the mankind).

Or course this is a great news for Paris and France as a whole. This lucky country that has Mozilla Europe HQ (this can compete only with Disneyland) will host all Board of Directors members together which will cumulate the amount of handsomeness, vibrant intelligence and energy that once created Captain Planet, and for 2 days will take the crown of the World from London, where the GFX Ninja keeps filling the void after Victoria and David Beckham.

For more official info, look at Pike’s blog (he’s smarter, but I’m younger ;)).

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Gecko goes SMIL

Roc just gave a go-ahead to initial SMIL patch developed by Brian Britles and maintained by Tim Rowley.

It’s not yet a full success, since this patch doesn’t make Gecko 100% compatible, but it’s a great starter and it dramatically increases the amount of SMIL that Gecko understands 🙂 I remember like one year ago I was using my private builds with SMIL support based on this patch and it worked pretty well – I was able to test most of the testcases I could find.

Go Gecko! 🙂

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Aviary.pl announces cooperation with Mozilla Corp.!

This is so exciting! I’m very happy to be able to announce that Aviary.pl accepted Mozilla Corporation as it’s strategic partner in localization of bugzilla.mozilla.org content! Finally!

Read the press announce!

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XBL 2.0 is a W3C recommendation!!!!!!

Woa!!! Hixie is my personal god of the day!
Gimme zool, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire…!

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Mozilla local community survey

Hi all!

If you’re a member of any local Mozilla community, please take a second to fill in this survey.

Thank you.

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Mozilla’s Ballmer would scream “Leverage!”

It came to me, after reading another tons of Mozilla Europe related emails with MoCorp, MoFo, and others, that if we would have any kind of Steve Ballmer in tha teem, and this person would go for something like the amazing “Developers, Developers, Developers“, he’ll scream “Leverage, Leverage, Leverage!”.

Trying to imagine Asa or Tristan doing so, puts a smile on my face.