The Japanese apparently love FireFox, at least by Asian standards. From FireFox`s download day website Japan has downloaded the new FireFox 3.0 the most times in all of Asia. Currently(6/19/08 2:34 am JST) Japan has downloaded FireFox 3.0 just over 400,000 times! This total is far and beyond any other nation in Asia. The internet addicted South Koreans have only downloaded v3.0 slightly over 44,000 times while China has downloaded it a shy over 167,000. Asian countries in which internet may be out of reach for many common people are also downloading v3.0 in much slower rates e.i. Vietnam(38,000), Cambodia(285), and Tailand(26,000).
Why are Japanese going ga-ga for FireFox 3.0? One of the reasons may be the ease at which one can find webpages and bookmark them. With v3.0 you never have to remember the address of that website you were looking at but forgot the bookmark. All it takes is to simply type in a keyword in the adress bar and FireFox displays in a little pop-up window all the site you have visited which match the keyword. So if a teenage Japanese guy was looking at sexy cosplay pics when Otosan walked into this bedroom offering a rice ball and he had to close his browser, when she leaves all he has to do to type in the keyword `cosplay` and FireFox will take him right back to what he was doing. This feature allows a user to have privacy in an instant; which will be a big plus for many Japanese. With the speed at which life can travel in places like Tokyo having a browser which will remember what you look at in encase you were too busy to bookmark, or just wanted to get those directions to a punk bar one more time, v3.0 will be a huge plus for Japanese users.
The only questions now remains is how long will it take japan to hit the one million download mark?
2 comments:
Hi Ryan, I've tagged you in my '8 things' post. Would be interesting to see your response :)
I got a Japanese student to start using Firefox recently.
Firefox 3.0 still can suck CPU (at least the OS X version) on some pages, but seems to be better than 2.0 which had no ability to handle flash without using 50% CPU or more.
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