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Politically Interesting numbers

Politically Interesting numbers

Posted Jun 20, 2008 16:59 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (guest, #16340)
Parent article: Over 8,000,000 Mozilla Firefox 3 Downloads in 24 Hours (MozillaZine)

Here's a couple that jumps off the page:
- Iran 483K
- Iraq 637
In terms of population, looks like Iran has the highest percentage of downloads - interesting,
how much of this is distrust of US conflated(?) with distrust of Microsoft?  And for Iraq, how
many of these were US soldiers and contractors, or do they have their IP routed through US?
(or is Firefox too radical for the DOD, like blogs?)  In any case it forces you to wonder how
many of Iraq's intellectual class have fled the country and how devastated is its
infrastructure, both horribly sad.

Venezuela was a surprise - would have thought socialist Chavez would have put computers in the
hands of more people.  Apparently, unlike de Silva of Brazil, he's not much of a technocrat.

Most disappointing for me were Russia, China and India.  What percent of those computers are
pirated Microsoft?  What percentage of the techs are hired in monolithic Microsoft shops?

South Korea was disappointing as well.  With their bandwidth and general technological wealth
they're showing an astonishing lack of independence.

Then we have Spain and Italy, one heading left and one heading right, but both heavy users.
One wonders if the US government will be using more Firefox if Obama is elected.


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Politically ignorant numbers

Posted Jun 20, 2008 18:03 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Brazil has 7.2 times as many people as Venezuela, and had 7.9 times as many downloads. That's a pretty weak thread to hang your political thesis on.

agreed

Posted Jun 20, 2008 18:41 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link]

(that took me complete off guard - thanks)

Politically Interesting numbers

Posted Jun 20, 2008 20:45 UTC (Fri) by szh (guest, #23558) [Link]

> Most disappointing for me were Russia,

good approximation for Russia is global statistics from this russian tracker (warning: non
ascii symbols)
http://gs.spylog.ru/r/?visitors=on&browser_name=__all...

Internet Explorer  61.4467%
Opera   18.9840%
FireFox 17.7853%
Mozilla   0.7595%
Safari    0.6719%
n/a       0.2216%
Netscape Navigator 0.0855%
Konqueror 0.0286% 


Politically Interesting numbers

Posted Jun 26, 2008 13:44 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

In South Korea, for historical reasons, retail web sites tend to use an ActiveX control
instead of SSL for encrypting purchase details. So Internet Explorer is pretty well locked-in
there.

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