Re: market research for HTML in Asia Re: An HTML language specification vs. a browser specification

Dan Connolly wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 00:58 -0800, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> [...]
>> In fact, we can still see this today. While firefox now has a worldwide 
>> marketshare of about 20%, our marketshare in many countries in Asia is 
>> tiny. Our market research data has shown that the main reason for that 
>> is website compatibility. Even though Firefox parses valid HTML4 very well.
> 
> I'd like to look at that research data; is it something
> you can share with the HTML WG? Is it already published?

Hi Dan,

So it seems I spoke a bit too strongly. We don't actually know that 
website compatibility is *the* main reason for slow marketshare, we just 
have strong indication that it is *a* big reason. I'm still trying to 
get hold of the actual data, but we did a survey about a year ago on the 
top 100 sites in China. Most of them did not work in firefox due to 
relying on IE quirks and IE-specific APIs

Now we don't have any actual data on that people choose other browsers 
because of this. However it seems like a fair assumption that if most 
popular sites do not work in a browser, many users will go for the 
browser where all sites work. But like I said, we don't actually have 
proof that people choose a browser that can render top 100 rather than 
one that can't. All evidence we have to show that part is anecdotal.

If I'm able to find the actual data for the survey I'll send it.

/ Jonas

Received on Thursday, 20 November 2008 23:15:02 UTC