If you have been browsing on youtube.com using Internet Explorer 6 lately, you may have encountered the following message:

We will be phasing out our support for your browser soon

As you can read, it seems that Google will be phasing out support for what was six years ago the most widely used browser during its tenure. This seems to be in sync with the end of Internet Explorer 6 and 7′s lifecycle on July 13, 2010, after which Microsoft will stop providing service packs and updates for both versions.

While the use of IE6 seems to decrease steadily in western countries and most European and American websites tend to abandon support for Microsoft’s legacy browser IE6 (around 5% of site traffic for Digg for example) in order to concentrate on new features and simplify development, this same version of IE is still widely used in Asia (particularly in China and Korea, where browser shares reach about 60% of the market for IE6, and 98% when combining numbers with the more up-to-date versions of the browser).

As I see it, we could see two different consequences in Korea.

First of all, this would involve updating computer software (browsers, but also operating system as newer versions of IE tend to be released in sync with newer versions of the Windows operating system) for a tremendous amount of machines in Asia.
Also, it would require a great deal of effort from developers in order to update existing web applications and make them working with recent browsers. Fortunately, if this tendency is confirmed, it may lead to great advancements in terms of usability, cross-browser compatibility, and democratization of open, cutting-edge web technologies (HTML5, ECMAScript4). It should also considerably alleviate website design, focusing more on accessibility, features or graphics rather than Javascript and CSS hacks.

Unfortunately, unless governments and organizations awaken and start to promote the use of newer, standard-compliant browsers (IE8, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera) and start pushing changes into business as well as higher education, consequences could become dramatic.
It could lead to the ostracism of Asian Internet, as not only would newer websites become incompatible with IE6, but as updates wouldn’t be pushed anymore, computer systems in these countries would become particularly vulnerable to hacking or virus attacks.

According to KoreanClick and the Korean Times, for the first time since its launch in Korea in 2008, YouTube became last month the number one video portal in terms of overall usage time with a 42.79% market share.

Although local player Pandora.tv lost its first position in June with 34.19% market share, it still maintained its top position in terms of unique visitors at 6.9 million versus 4.7 million for YouTube.

This might come as a surprise to many, as YouTube was highly criticized last April when it refused to implement the real name system required by the Korean government. Instead of asking its users to provide their real names and identification number to upload videos, YouTube decided in a controversial move to disable the functionality on its Korean site. It was then highly anticipated that users would eventually leave YouTube in favor of local competitors Like Pandora.tv, but as this study shows, it clearly was not the case.

Apart from the efforts Google (who owns YouTube) is constantly making to try to better listen to its Korean users and adapt itself to the Korean market, the reason why YouTube has an increasing market share in Korea might just be because of its ease-of-use and focus on usability (quick registration process, no activeX or special player required to play videos), the recent possibility to embed videos on Cyworld (first social network in Korea), as well as the amount and diversity of content made available from its worldwide user base. Clearly an excellent recipe to build a very strong position in the Korean market.