14 DAY TRIAL // It's always interesting to analyze browser and OS statistics in China, as local Internet users stick to older software more than everyone else and refuse to upgrade until they really have no other choice.
Figures provided by market researcher StatCounter for the month of April 2014 show that Google Chrome is the leading browser in China with a share of 44.71 percent, followed by Internet Explorer with 33.7 percent.
What's interesting is that while Internet Explorer is the second browser in the country, Firefox has dropped to the fourth position after the locally-developed Sogou Explorer, which is running on 7.07 percent of the computers in China.
Sogou Explorer is developed by Sogou, a subsidiary of Sohu.com, and uses a dual-engine configuration that borrows the browsing engine from both Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.
Interestingly, Sogou Explorer has grown so much lately that it's now the third top operating system in the country, while Firefox lost ground and is now installed on only 5.37 percent of the Chinese PCs. Another locally-developed application comes next, namely QQ browser, which has a market share of 2.87 percent.
China is also one of the countries where Windows XP remains extremely popular, even though Microsoft has already removed support for this OS version, and local users have until now shown no intention to move to a newer product such as Windows 7 or 8.1.