Ever since we came out with our India Android consumption report, we have had several requests to follow up with more statistics about Internet usage in India. The most credible request was to know how many Internet Explorer users still exist In India and as web developers we found this to be a very important number to study. Amit Singh, CEO at WPoets had this to say —
Developing websites that work perfectly across various browsers is bit complex job with old version of IE still in use and on top of it all different modern browsers support different subsets of css 3 properties making it difficult to apply them without using various Javascript libraries.
In our hunt to explore more, we reached out to the various Indian startups and companies across Lifestyle, Shopping, SaaS and Mobile Services. We found in our survey that Chrome is the clear winner in the browser war with Firefox in second position. As expected, Android’s default browser rules the chart with majority shares across all the sectors. iOS’s Mobile Safari takes the number 2 spot when it comes to mobile. Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile / Phone see usage in the range of 5% across all categories.
Commenting on the consumption of specific versions of Internet Explorer, people are using IE8 and IE9 the most. The most dreaded version, Internet Explorer 6 and even its successor is almost dead with consumption ranging from 0 to 3%. IE10 is yet in its early stage and the consumption is only in single digits.
Rohan Dighe, CEO of ViralMint spoke about the challenges of device fragmentation, and how modern web technologies aren’t fully solving problems right now:
In over 7 years of web development, the number of different devices to support was never as many. Even with Responsive Web Design coming in, developing for low and mid range smartphones / feature phones is a challenge. Sadly, one cannot avoid making a simple HTML site for mobile In India
Here are the conclusions from our study:
– Mobile Browsers sooner than later will contribute to 1/4th of your India traffic. Lifestyle players like Zomato saw highest usage of mobile at 24%, while high volume e-commerce sites saw the same at around 15%
– Sites offering a mobile version saw higher mobile usage
– High volume e-commerce sites saw an average of 45% desktop users preferring Google Chrome and 25% on Firefox
– Business to Business Websites see most usage from desktops
– IE6 is contained in the range of 5% even for high volume e-commerce sites.
– Internet Explorer 8 is the most popular IE version In India with close to 50% marketshare, it is closely followed by IE 9. IE10 is slow to gain traction with about 5% marketshare
We studied India traffic for the following sites In February 2013 to prepare this report. A big thank you to all our contributors!
List of our contributors:
Ayojak, Exotel, Freecharge, Greytip, Infibeam, PayTM & Zomato
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