Updated Native Language Coverage Stats

In the past I’ve produced stats trying to estimate the percentage of the world Internet population who can get each of the major browsers in their native language. At Seth’s request, I recently updated the stats for Firefox 3.5, and you can get the new spreadsheet on the page on my website. There’s also a FAQ there. Some headline figures:

Total World Net Population: 1,231,026,000

Category Count Percentage
Firefox 2 official 42 87.6%
Firefox 3 official 59 93.5%
Firefox 3.5 latest 65 96.5%
Opera 9.6 35 87.0%
IE 7 77 98.1%
IE 8 now 39 90.3%
IE 8 mid-May 57 95.4%
Chrome 39 92.0%

Note that we will be beating IE8 by almost a percentage point even after they do their delayed ship of a load more languages in mid-May. And we simul-ship everything on the day of release :-) And also, with every release we’re getting better – and yet even after mid-May, IE 8 won’t be available in as many languages as IE 7. Our l10n teams rock :-)

4 thoughts on “Updated Native Language Coverage Stats

  1. I think the count for Chrome is low. IIRC it launched with 42 (?) languages and recently added support for at least 8 more… although I don’t know if you’re only counting the Stable channel, where perhaps these changes haven’t made it yet.

    I don’t know the accurate figures or where to find them, unfortunately.

  2. Those are all very high numbers, considering the diversity of languages in the world.

    Although, I’m curious as to how you determine a percentage of the world internet population that has any given native language; I was not aware there were reliable numbers on the native languages of internet users, particularly in parts of the world where they mostly don’t have the internet at home but access it in other locations. Take sub-saharan Africa for instance. I’m not sure how anyone could measure the number of internet users in a place like that, much less what percentage of them have any given native language.

    Then again, if they don’t have the internet at home, I guess it doesn’t matter so much whether the browser is theoretically available in their native language, since they’ll be using it in whatever lingua franca the provider selected anyway (probably one that all of the major browsers support pretty well, very likely English or French). So for the purpose of browser language support, maybe the stats are good enough.

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