The future of internet browsers in China
Updated browser please!
While the entire rest of the world moved on and is using browsers like IE9, Firefox4, Opera 10, Chrome, Safari 5, etc. China still has to camp with pirated Windows XP copies loaded with IE6 engine and a force disabled auto Windows update.
On top of that most of the Chinese browsers like Maxton, 360 and others have just taken the IE6 core and are still bringing out new copies of a browser engine even Microsoft themselves have dropped support for.
Following chart speaks for itself.
Here you can clearly notice IE6 for the win with a staggering 40% market share, coming behind it is Qihoo 360, another browser based on IE6 engine.
There is above chart and below information from Baidu regarding the browser market share in 2011.
You can notice a slight drop in the IE6 slice but it still hardly makes a difference.
How we solve this.
The solution we use at Petralian to camp with this problem are IE6 gracefully degradable websites. Because of the IE6 engine, a lot of new technology like most of the better jQuery and other AJAX related code simply cannot be used in an IE6 site. Fancy java or javascript, cool flash effects, forget about it because IE6 demands a programmer to “hack” most of the website code just so it will load properly on IE6, in short a site gets 30-50% more expensive just to make it work on IE6 and it will not even look as nice as it would look on a newer browser (ANY newer browser not based on IE6).
How can you help?
A solution from the Chinese user’s end is to manually upgrade your browser, no single person I know is still using IE6 and if I do find people around me that use it I either update their browser myself or I at least try to explain to them what they are missing. I can only recommend everyone around me to try and do the same, this might be the only way to make the Chinese users get rid of the single biggest stopper in Chinese internet technology growth.
If you happen to have a friend who works for Baidu or Tencent, it would be so wise to ask them to add a “upgrade your browser” bar to the top of the main Chinese portal pages (RenRen, Sina, Sohu, QQ, etc.) and finally push China to the next level of internet technology. However slight a chance, I can only hope they get the message and set the trend for better browser technology in China.