Wouldn’t anyone of us wish to go on an around the world (or at least around Europe) trip and explore the differences between cultures, countries and markets? Let’s leave on such a journey today! With today’s post we are starting a short cycle of texts which will refer to no other than browser markets in the countries covered by gemiusRanking. Upon analyzing local tendencies and specificities some interesting facts can’t go unnoticed. As it turns out, many of the seemingly obvious assumptions in reality have nothing in common whatsoever with the true state of affairs. And just to give an extensive overview of the trends on the market, the countries are grouped according to the observed similarities.
For a good start it is the most numerous group of countries covered with gemiusRanking service that is going to be discussed – Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. It is in these countries where starting from Q4 2008 a long-awaited reshuffle at the top of the browsers ranking has begun – meaning dethronement of Internet Explorer by Mozilla Firefox. The forerunner in this change was Slovakia, where as early as in August 2008, the product of Redmond giant was pushed down. This pattern was followed by Hungary and Poland (both in March 2009), later Bulgaria (September 2009) and finally Lithuania (February 2010), only to lead to a present situation, illustrated by the following graph.
Chart 1. Popularity of top 3 browsers on the chosen markets of the CEE region; source: Gemius, gemiusTraffic, July 2011
Upon viewing the tendencies on these markets another important upcoming trend may be observed – following Firefox’s victory over Internet Explorer, the former begun to lose its earlier speed and its share is currently situated at the level of 40-ish percent. Now, the changes in its share have nothing in common with the speedy growth which was observed in the years 2007-2009, when its share doubled on the above mentioned markets. At present, it is Chrome, that, as if looking at the recent example of Firefox, visibly accelerates and is soon expected to become number two by outrunning MSIE. This seems to be a trend that every of the discussed in this post markets follows and the one closest to attaining its finale is Slovakia, where the gap between the two types of browsers is just a little over 4 percents.
In other words, the discussed countries follow a pattern which already resulted in a notable reshuffle on one of the CEE countries, that is Latvia. On this Baltic market, following the above described trend, MSIE lost its primacy to Firefox’s advantage already in December 2008. Further on, in April 2011, it further lost its position in the top 3 ranking to the advantage of Google Chrome and currently comes third in the ranking. This turnaround at the top of the ranking took about two years and 4 months.
The question which remains unanswered is what are the reasons for these changes? Why does MSIE lose its share first to the Mozilla product and then to the Google one? Some say that this may be a proof of advancing development of the markets – as it is claimed that MSIE is a product for web newbies. On the other hand, it may be caused by the incompatibility of the latest, ninth, version of Internet Explorer, which may run on Windows 7 or Vista only. In a situation when the previous Windows version, XP, remains tremendously popular, this restriction certainly doesn’t help building the popularity of the product. Furthermore, the implementation of the new Firefox “rapid-release” publishing cycle by Mozilla foundation surely had its impact on the increase in the shares of this product. Still the increase in the share of this browser due to the above mentioned factor does not have to be accompanied with the satisfaction of the users with the quality of the product. It is no secret that many of the users are ambivalent towards the new publishing pace, by arguing that the new versions lack stability and thus a desired security level.
And as for Google Chrome? Its popularity unquestionably derives from frequent updates, very good speed and high security level. But also (or as some may maintain, only from this factor) it may simply stem from the strength of the producer’s brand, Google. Undeniably, this brand and a related television advertising campaign have contributed to the victory of this product with Mozilla one on the British market and seizure of the second position.
Still the question remains: will we observe a reshuffle similar to the Latvian one on the discussed 6 markets? Taking into account Chrome’s share growth of 2.5-3 percentage points per quarter in the total number of page views made in the discussed countries (which may be observed on the graph below) and the decreasing share of Internet Explorer which till Q3 2011 lost almost 23 percentage points since Q4 2008, the change of places may be expected during Q1 or Q2 2012. This is of course only if the current trends are maintained.
Chart 3. The popularity of MSIE, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome on the markets of Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia (in total); source: Gemius, gemiusTraffic, Q4 2008-Q3 2011
In the next post from the “Around the EMEA region with top browsers” series, we are going to move eastward to explore Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, where it is the Opera browser that scores a success. So get ready for Part Two with this and more specificities of Eastern web browsers markets.
