[xiaoma]

I wouldn't say stronghold. IE is still the leader but by a relatively small margin in most English speaking markets.

The strongholds are China and Korea, where IE usage is well over 70%. In fact, considering that China has the most internet usage of anywhere in the world I have my doubts about the veracity of the world-wide graph. It probably drastically undersamples Chinese numbers.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-CN-monthly-201105-201205

[Tobu]

StatCounter sees low usage from China (in page-views). The great firewall certainly plays a role. I wonder if said firewall doesn't also play games with the user-agent header, though.

http://gs.statcounter.com/press/open-letter-ms#incorrect-wei...

[xiaoma]

I don't buy it. I just moved here from China a couple of months ago, and if anything I'd say 70% is an overly conservative estimation of IE usage. Both of my banks, for example, were accessible only through IE with an active X plug-in which made it impossible for me to check my balance on my mac. The same was true of many, many other sites. Much like the US was 10 years ago, only really hard-core geeks were likely to have firefox or other alternative browsers.

As for usage, I also don't buy that. Most people in China are online primarily through their phones, but in first tier cities (which is still a gigantic population), people have bandwidth that most Americans could only dream of. Youku, for example, streamed 5 times the hours of video content as all of Youtube last I checked. And Tudou (which it is merging with) was a competitor on the same scale! In terms of page views, I'd be shocked if Amazon had as many as Taobao. No US news portal approaches QQ. Actually, Tencet (owner of QQ) is considering buying Yahoo!. The only way in which China's internet is small is in the amount of money its users want to spend on content.

[seanmcdirmid]

I disagree with your claim that bandwidth in 1st tier cities is anywhere as good as in the states. At work, at home, and in the cafe my internet is always slow, even when pinging local sites (Beijing). I'm always amazed when I go back to the states to visit and I can use...Netflix at my sister's place. Americans have bandwidth that we Beijingers can only dream of.

True about IE and banks, but its easy enough to use IE when banking online and switch to whatever else you want.

I don't know what the numbers really are; I suspect IE use is still high but might be lower in Beijing given all the Macbooks being used by the middle class.

[xiaoma]

It sounds like you just have a terrible connection. I had a 10mb connection for < 30USD/month and regularly streamed HD video, sometimes US video through a VPN. At work was even faster. That was in Beijing up until this May. It looks like I'd have a free upgrade up to 20mb if I were still there!

http://battery-pack-adapter.com/beijing-unicom-broadband-spe...

As for banking, the problem was that their active X component was a .exe download. Even with IE, it wasn't doable on a mac. ICBC did claim to have a mac app in the works, but I didn't see it before leaving.

[seanmcdirmid]

Terrible connection in one location could just be a fluke, but in more than three locations? We've been thinking about upgrading our link, but many of our problems at home are that entire sites don't work, especially at night when internet use is very popular.

China is still not as wired as the states, South Korea is much better and could be considered to excede the states, even countries like Thailand and Indonesia provide much better bandwidth when I visit (and no GFW to boot!).