This posting is inspired by a Slashdot Japan story of the same title. Some of the points made in the story are elaborated here.
According to a presentation in Mozilla Japan Seminar, Firefox's share is substantially smaller in Japan than in other regions. At this point, Firefox has 12% share world-wide, 20% in Europe, 15% in North America, 10% across Asia, and as small as 4% in Japan. Let me think why.
Japanese-Unfriedly
I think the prime reason is that Firefox is so Japanese-unfriendly. Firefox's web site design, download instruction, documentation, default font and character parameters have or used to have rooms for improvement for Japanese speakers. Average computer users in Japan are not comfortable with them. Even though there are a fair number of Japanese speakers involved with Firefox, Japanese localization is not enough.
For example, Japanese characters having many strokes on average, readability of serif fonts is noticeably less than san serif on computer screens. Screen resolution is still not enough to display serifs of a complex character at 10 point or so. Think about the dawn of personal computer around 1980. Characters being displayed at 5 dot by 7 dot, serif font design was impractical.
Firefox had long been employing a serif font (Mincho) as the default Japanese font. Whereas Internet Explorer's default Japanese font is a san serif font (Gothic). From version 1.5, Firefox's default Japanese font is san serif though.
I suspect that in Japan, English proficiency rate among computer users is quite low -- probably the world lowest. There are regions where general English proficiency rate is lower than Japan. But in those regions, computer users are in the privileged class and they tend to speak English.
Japanese Friendly Alternatives
There is another noteworthy factor. Before Firefox became popular, several free tab browsers using IE component emerged in Japan. Firefox's biggest appeal (arguably) being the tab feature, computer users in Japan got good IE based alternatives before Firefox. Those free tab browsers are written by Japanese programmer, those browsers are comfortable for Japanese users in terms of documentation, default parameters, and the feature set.
Postscript on 2006-09-28
Originally, I mentioned that one reason of low English proficiency in Japan was education. Not the quality of English education, but the fact that education is done in Japanese all the way. Whereas many non English speaking countries, college education is done in English.
A reader pointed out that in most countries, education is done in local language up to graduate school. I asked a Peruvian and an Italian friends about it. The reader is proved to be right.
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5 comments:
Interesting post! I was working on a piece about Firefox marketing in Japan when I came across it.
Hello Himazu, thanks for you post.
I think you will find that in ALL non-English speaking countries, education is conducted in the local language right up until university graduation. The Japanese is not unique in having poor English skills. It's a common Japanese misconception that all foreigners can speak English. In non-English speaking countries (ie EVERYWHERE except the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) English is learnt in schools -- just like in Japan! So there's no legitimate reason for the Japanese to have worse English skills than (for example) a Swede, Chinese or Russian.
Aha. Maybe so. College education being provided in the local language may not be a cause or sign of Japanese people's English non-proficiency.
But still, I think the average English proficiency among college graduates is substantially lower in Japan than in many non English countries.
Is it also a myth?
Am I seeing English proficient people selectively in other non English speaking countries?
"So there's no legitimate reason for the Japanese to have worse English skills than (for example) a Swede, Chinese or Russian."
This is not correct, they have completely different backgrounds. In Sweden they use English from childhood, and they broadcast programs in English on TV. I don't know how close Swedish is to English, but it's definitely closer than Japanese, and I would say the same for Russian and other European languages.
My mother tongue is a European language and I learned English very quickly but I have been trying to learn Japanese for years and my progress is slow. The big difference between Eastern and Western languages has to be taken into account.
From my experience the Chinese are not much different to the Japanese in their English ability, and the Chinese are known to have very bad English translations in restaurants and public signs in China. But I think you can expect to meet more Chinese who can speak English in the West because of the huge Chinese population.
In China there are also many users of tab-capable internet-explorer-based browsers, but as far as I know, most firefox fans love the extensions(add-ons) and safety more than tab-browsing. Most of the ff fans are heavy users of the extensions. FF is also widely accepted as a portable browser.
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