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Actually, the biggest pool of IE6 users are people from poor countries running pirated copies of Windows XP with no access to automatic updates.


I checked out http://gs.statcounter.com/ . Select Browser Version, maybe view as bar graph.

Africa and Asia lead in IE6 by almost 25%. I was surprised, but it does make sense -- pirated XP comes with IE6, people can't use Windows Update, so they just stick with it.


Not entirely coincidentally, Asia - with its high-bandwidth internet infrastructure - sends a lot of spam. (Although it's getting better lately.)


They have access to Firefox's and Chrome's automatic updates!


Just like everywhere else, they'll use what comes with the OS.


Just because they have a pirated version of XP doesn't mean they heard about Firefox or Chrome.


I hadn't heard this before. Do you have data to support that claim?


Here's the article I remembered:

http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/08/aye-pirates-be-reason-ie6-ju...

Interestingly, some specific countries (namely the Phillipines and Indonesia) have a much lower IE6 usage than their equally poor neighbours, due to a very high market share of Firefox.


Another interesting fact: Both Taiwan (40%) and South Korea (43%) have piracy rates comparable to Singapore (37%), but 5-6 times more IE6 users (32-38% vs 6%). The correlation is not particularly strong there. Other factors might be at play.

In South Korea, for example, all payment gateways and government portals are required by law to have certain "security features", which can only be implemented as an ActiveX control. (Good luck with security!) That explains the 94%+ IE adoption rate. Also, all those ActiveX controls break every time a new version of IE comes out, so users are understandably reluctant to move away from IE6. In fact, I've heard rumors that the only reason IE8 still supports ActiveX is that the South Korean government specifically requested it.

Of course, China and India together totally skew the statistics. Each of them is bigger than everybody else combined.


I've found this to be true. Firefox is very, very popular in the Philippines on all those pirated WinXPsp3 boxes.




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