Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

The most iPad-friendly countries

To answer the question of which countries are the most iPad-friendly, we used web-browsing data from StatCounter, which is based on visitor stats from more than three million sites (see further details at the end of the article). StatCounter includes the iPad in its operating system stats, so we get a good indication of the iPad’s popularity.

What we found was that the top 10 iPad-friendly countries are: Singapore, Brunei, Angola, Nigeria, Australia, Kuwait, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Bahamas, and Hong Kong.

As you can see, Singapore is in the lead, with just over 7% of desktop web browsing traffic in the country. Brunei and Angola follow close behind with just under 6%. Clearly, in these countries, as in many others, the iPad is having quite an impact.

The most iPad-friendly regions

That was the top 10 countries in the world, which are iPad-friendly in the sense that the population there browse the web a lot with Apple’s tablet. But what does it look like if we apply this to a map of the entire world?

Then we see Oceania in a clear lead when it comes to iPad usage, closely followed by North America, Europe, and then Asia. Worldwide, the iPad accounted for 2.22% of all desktop web traffic.

Interestingly enough, although no countries in North America make it onto the top 10 list, as a region it scores a rather respectable 3.36%.

And in case you were curious, Android tablets accounted for 0.33% of worldwide desktop browsing.

What mark will the new iPad leave?

There you have it, how iPad-friendly countries around the world are. This doesn’t say anything about how popular the new iPad is though, something that would be interesting to know.

Granted, it’s now only a couple of months since Apple released its third-generation iPad, but it may cause bloat on the web.

If you have an iPad, do you find that you use it a lot to browse the web?

About the data: We looked at desktop OS market share data from StatCounter, which is based on visitor stats from more than three million websites. StatCounter reports iPad web traffic as “iOS” in the operating system category. To get up-to-date numbers, we focused on the month of May, 2012. You can see all our data here.

Flags of Angola, Australia, and Nigeria, as well as flags of countries in Asia and Europe, and top picture via Shutterstock.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

The growing footprint of bitmap graphics

High-resolution monitors place increasing demands on the resolution of our graphics resources. For example, most of today’s monitors of good quality have around 110-130 PPI (pixels per inch). A retina display like that on the new iPad has around 300 PPI.

A square image with a side of 5 inches on a 130 PPI screen is 650×650 pixels. On a 300 PPI screen an image with the same dimensions would be have to be 1500×1500 pixels.

So, going from 130 to 300 PPI, the same 5-inch square image goes from containing 422,500 pixels to containing 2,250,000 pixels. That’s more than 5 times as many.

In other words, serving increasingly large images with bitmap graphics formats like JPG and PNG is becoming impractical, or at least inefficient.

All web page resources are growing in size year over year, but images account for such a large part of the average web page size that they have a bigger impact than for example CSS or HTML files. Keeping their size in check is very important.

Enter SVG and resolution independence

Modern browsers support SVG, a scalable vector graphics format (a cookie if you guess what the acronym stands for…). You’ve most likely heard of it, maybe even played around with it. SVG is standardized and has been around for years, but isn’t used much in web design today, most likely due to the poor browser support it used to have.

The benefit of vector graphics is that it’s resolution-independent and has a small memory footprint. The same image data can be rendered to a low resolution or a super-high resolution, it can scale indefinitely without any loss in quality.

Not all graphics resources are suitable for vector formats, of course. Photos are poor candidates for SVG. However, a lot of the graphics on the Web is made up of illustrations and icons, which are perfect for vector graphics.

Use of vector graphics future-proofs those resources, at least in terms of supported display resolutions. Check out the Emacs for Mac OS X site, for example, which totals in at a mere 21 kB, all resources included, and is scalable to any resolution (open it, resize the browser window to see it in effect).

Also, since SVG is a text-based markup language (XML-based), it compresses nicely with standard gzip, making the transfer size even smaller when people load your website.

Is browser support good enough?

Browsers with basic SVG support include Internet Explorer 9 and later, Firefox 4 and later, Chrome 4 and later, Safari 4 and later, Opera 9.5 and later. These account for around 80% of the web browsers in use today according to StatCounter data for May.

Check out CanIUse.com for more details on SVG feature support in different browsers.

Remember, you can always have a fallback option, a version of the site that uses pre-rendered JPG and/or PNG images if you detect that the browser doesn’t have SVG support. And no one says you need to use SVG for everything.

The tools are already there

It’s not like designers are handicapped when it comes to creating SVG content. The vector graphics tool chain is already in place, thanks to applications like Adobe Illustrator. There are even free, open source options, such as Inkscape.

Most logos and many icons are already designed with vector graphics, and it’s common in print. The translation to Web should be relatively straightforward. Famous last words, we know, but people are already proving it can be done, and done with style.

Conclusion

In short, web designers could use SVG to a much larger extent than they do today. It may not be suitable for all kinds of content, but there are plenty of websites that would benefit from it.

The win is a smaller memory footprint (faster download), and resolution independence. This will become increasingly important as more high-resolution monitors come into the market.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a website where all graphics automatically matches the screen resolution perfectly, and not have to worry that your site looks like a pixelated mess on that new iPad retina display?

What now?

If you want to dive right in and explore the world of SVG for web design, A List Apart has an excellent primer by Shelley Powers (don’t miss that there’s a part 2). You might also want to check out this introductory article by David Bushell over at Smashing Magazine. You can also head over to W3Schools for an introduction.

Image credit: Top image via Shutterstock.

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But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

Facebook winners

Brazil is the winner, by far, when it comes to amassing Facebook users, but in relative terms there are many other winners, as well. Here are the top 10 countries where Facebook has gained most users over the last six months:

As you can see, almost 17 million Brazilians have joined Facebook over the last six months. That’s an impressive number even when you look at the percentage – it represents a growth of 54.37%. There are countries that have grown more than Brazil in relative terms, like Japan, but not one is even close to the population size of Brazil.

Facebook losers

Then we flip the list and look at the ten countries that have lost the most users over the last six months. Suddenly, Puerto Rico is in the number one spot, shedding 232,980 users, followed by Venezuela, which saw a decline of 86,560 users over the same period.

But when we look at what relative size of the decline this represents, Puerto Rico is no longer in the lead, so to speak. That honor goes instead to Turkmenistan, which lost 34.82% of its Facebook users over the past six months. But even for Puerto Rico, the percentage loss is rather steep at 16.06%.

Facebook penetration around the world

While knowing how many people are using Facebook in countries around the world is interesting, it’s also valuable to see where the potential for growth is.

In other words, what percentage of the population in a particular country or region is using Facebook, and where the biggest potential growth is. Here’s what the current situation looks like for Facebook:

Clearly, the region where Facebook stands the most to gain, at least in terms of users, is Asia, where almost 217 million Facebook users represent only 5.6% of the population.

Obviously Africa stands out in addition to Asia, with only 4.28% Facebook penetration, but the population is also smaller (around 25% of the population of Asia). In addition, Internet penetration in Africa also lags behind Asia.

Conclusion

As Facebook is getting ready for its IPO, these are numbers that are probably studied in great detail by potential investors around the world. It seems evident that Facebook needs an expansion plan that involves all corners of the world, but that focuses on certain regions, like Africa and Asia.

We noted last year that despite 80% of Facebook users already being outside the U.S., the number of users that could be added to Facebook in population-rich Africa and Asia is enormous.

Throw into the mix that China still blocks Facebook, and the possible future paths for Facebook look even more interesting.

Note: We used Socialbakers as the data source for this article.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

This week’s suggested reading about Dell’s Ubuntu developer ultrabook

Introducing Project Sputnik: Developer laptop :: Barton’s Blog

To put it in context, Sputnik is part of an effort by Dell to better understand and serve the needs of developers in Web companies. We want to finds ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible. And what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish, running the 12.04 LTS release of Ubuntu Linux.

Could be alternative to MacBook Air.

Dell plots Ubuntu laptop for developers with eye on OpenStack cloud :: InfoWorld

One of Dell’s visions for Project Sputnik is to enable developers to download premade, ready-to-use developer environments — effectively profiles with all the necessary tools for coding in various languages. “If you wanted the Ruby profile for developing in Ruby, or Android, or JavaScript, you could go and take those packages down and use them on your system,” George said in the Dell Vlog.

Sounds like a very cool idea.

Dell puts Sputnik open-source laptop on launch pad :: The Register

Dell is crafting a tool with coders that connects to a GitHub repository and pulls down “developer profiles” – a toolchain configuration built to suit a particular type of work – the first of which are targeting Android, Ruby and JavaScript development. After these Dell wants the community to build profiles of their own and it’s inviting feedback at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, California, this week.

Project Sputnik: Developer Focused Dell XPS13 :: Dustin Kirkland

I’m absolutely thrilled to have been invited by Barton George to participate in Dell’s Project Sputnik! As of this morning, the gag order has been lifted and I can finally publicly blog about it I’m writing this blog post from a brand new Dell XPS13, given to me by Dell! Project Sputnik is a new endeavor from Dell to produce a portable hardware and software platform specifically designed for developers. Have you been to a conference recently where the predominant hacker platform involved a legion of Mac Airs running OSX? Well, I think we finally have a contender

He has one already, they lucky…

Dell tests open-source laptop for developers :: GigaOM

What is it that web developers want? That’s what Dell is trying to find out with its just-launched Project Sputnik, an “experimental” laptop bundled with Ubuntu Linux plus utilities, and with an easy on-ramp to github repositories coming soon. Sputnik looks like Dell’s attempt to wrest the attention of the many web developers that have defected to OS X, but chafe at the restrictions Apple’s walled garden imposes on them.

But it won’t have the cute apple on the outside

And finally, make sure you take a look at this: “I don’t know. It just feels… different.” It might just explain everything!

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

Besides showing our support for this very worthwhile – and non-profit – effort, we would like to document a day in the life of Pingdom and its employees.

We’re all geeks here at Pingdom, so we get excited about any cool idea where we can use technology and Aday.org certainly is one such project.

From morning to evening, on May 15, we will take photos of all different aspects of what the geeks at Pingdom are up to. This could be having breakfast, going to work, writing code, having a meeting, design something, and anything and everything in between.

You will find our photos on the Aday website, of course. There is a 10-picture limit for how many you can upload (and you actually have a week to upload them, so you don’t necessarily have to do it on the 15^th), so we felt like we would also document our day at aday.pingdom.com.

Why don’t you join in, as well? Just sign up for a free account, charge up your camera batteries and empty the flash cards. May 15, here we come!

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If you follow the Royal Pingdom blog, you know we love cool and geeky stuff, like what’s happening with the Internet, web, performance, gadgets, and more.

Do you think you could contribute one or more articles to the Royal Pingdom blog?

We’re looking for top-notch quality content that is informative, analytical, engaging, funny, inquisitive, and, of course, of interest to our readers.

If you think you’ve got what it takes, send us an email, with some details about yourself, and what you’d like to write about.

If we feel that you could be a match for what we’re looking for, we’ll be in touch.

To get ahead of the question of whether we accept guest posts from companies writing about their services, we can simply say we’re not against it. But it should be of interest to our readership, and it should not be just a sales pitch for your stuff.

We’ll post this to the Pingdom Blog as well.

Image (top) via Shutterstock.

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In our continuing series of interviews about web performance, we’re now joined by Yannick Kunegel, Manager, Systems Engineering – Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Citrix Systems.

Citrix may not be the company that comes first to your mind when thinking about web performance or web companies. But if you look at its wide range of products and services, you’ll see that they do care very deeply about the web and how fast web services are for users.

Pingdom: Why is web performance such a hot topic right now?

Yannick: Poor web performance impacts customers’ experience, resulting in increased page abandonment and, as a result, potential loss of revenue and customer loyalty. While web and mobile sites have evolved in recent years with the latest technology to engage customers or drive sales, it is increasingly critical to provide fast and reliable site performance to ensure that websites always deliver to their audience.

Pingdom: There’s a lot of evidence that web users tend to leave a website if it loads slowly. Are users getting more demanding and impatient, or are there other reasons behind this?

Yannick: As people get more and more used to surfing on the Internet, their expectations of faster response times continues to grow. Benchmarks are typically being set by Internet leaders like Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, companies that leverage web acceleration solutions to deliver an increasingly speedy service to users. And their investment pays off, as research from the Aberdeen Group found recently. A research showed that the average impact of a 1-second delay meant a 7% reduction in conversions to sales for an online store. For an e-commerce site earning $100,000 per day, a one-second delay can mean up to $2.5 million in lost revenues over the course of a year.

Pingdom: Web performance involves a lot of testing and numbers. But at the end of the day, isn’t a user’s experience a personal and subjective experience? How do you reconcile the two?

Yannick: The best approach would be to benchmark performance and conduct a survey across different user groups. Compare the two and use the median as the targeted response time to gain a good balance. The challenge, however, is then to maintain a consistent performance even during peak connection times, which is exactly where networking solutions such as Citrix NetScaler play a fundamental role by offering the required level of scalability.

Pingdom: Could, at least part of, the answer to improved web performance for end users be tighter integration between the components involved, like hardware, software, networking, etc.?

Yannick: Yes, absolutely. We would typically look into leveraging mechanisms such as TCP protocol optimization, content caching, data compression, load balancing of multiple Web servers or SSL offloading to improve web performance for users.

Pingdom: What’s the relationship between web performance and scalability?  

Yannick: Web performance is the raw speed of your application for a single user, for example, the time it takes for a single application-level operation. Scalability is commonly understood as the measurement of resiliency under an ever-increasing user load. Though these are two different concepts, their purpose is interwoven as we look at how many users can be served by the existing web infrastructure within acceptable performance parameters.

Pingdom: Best practice in mobile web performance isn’t as well established as in other fields like desktop. Are we getting closer to a sort of universal agreement or understanding of performance in the mobile space as well?

Yannick: The move to mobile is inevitable as both consumer and enterprise technologies venture into the mobile space. Growth of the mobile web installed base should stimulate further growth of mobile commerce. Expectations from mobile performance are ambitious. Although there are many more moving parts, bandwidth constraints and device limitations in the mobile application delivery chain, consumers often have the same expectations in terms of performance from the mobile Internet as from the connected desktop.  While rich content is available in more and more websites, most carriers are looking at ways to optimize content delivery to reduce data consumption, and strive to maintain quality of service under different network conditions.

Pingdom: For someone who is going to start working with their website and performance, where do you suggest they start? What should they do first?

Yannick: The focus should start on enabling the infrastructure that will eventually support the website front end. We firstly recommend consulting a specialized organization such as Citrix on how to design a web infrastructure that will help them meet the level of security and performance they require from their website.

Pingdom: With everyone talking about cloud, it seems to be everywhere. What’s your view on cloud and web performance?

Yannick: People are driving cloud adoption with their increasing need for flexibility and mobility in the management of time between work and leisure. Companies that understand this growing trend and the needs of their employees will need to align their applications and content development solutions with this in mind. Some of the largest websites are already hosted by public cloud providers, and this delivers further proof that cloud and web performance are compatible in the long run.

Pingdom: What are we going to see happen in the next few years in terms of web performance?

Yannick: Consumerization of IT is the one of the biggest trends we can expect to see emerge in the next few years and this is just the tip of the iceberg. The mobile platform will drive a massive increase in traffic, which ultimately will impact the scalability and agility for web performance and compel organizations to design and strengthen their web infrastructure accordingly.

Pingdom: Finally, is there something exciting that you or your company is working on in terms of web performance that you can tell us about?

Yannick: As IT managers transform their traditional datacenters into enterprise clouds, bringing the infrastructure in line with the new trends in the market, they need real solutions that scale performance on-demand for cloud-like elasticity. These solutions enable businesses to expand capacity seamlessly to meet application traffic growth, as well as consolidate core network capabilities like load balancing, security and acceleration for all datacenter applications into a single platform.

Citrix has released TriScale technology to address these needs for enterprises and service providers that need multiple methods for scaling their network. With the TriScale technology, organizations of all types, sizes, and levels of cloud maturity can, for example, make the network elastic with 5x faster performance on-demand, replacing fixed-capacity appliances with flexible, software-based Pay-As-You-Grow licensing; seamlessly expand capacity up to 32x with advanced clustering technology and scale the number of applications and/or business units (supported by consolidating up to 40 NetScaler app delivery policies into just one NetScaler SDX platform).

About Yannick Kunegel

Yannick Kunegel is Citrix’s Regional Manager, Systems Engineering, for Middle-East & Africa. In his role he leads a team of Citrix Solution consultants who help organizations evaluate, test and design virtualization solutions. He has more than 15 years experience in IT across Europe and Middle East, with expertise ranging from desktop virtualization to high performance computing and storage from his Silicon Graphics days. Yannick has a Master Degree in Computer Science from the University of Nancy, France.

About the “10 questions about web performance” interview series

We have gathered some of the best and brightest minds in the web and IT industry to a discussion about web performance. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be rolling out a series of interviews, bringing together people from web design, mobile and computer hardware, web hosting, software, and other areas. You can find all the interviews in this series on the Royal Pingdom blog.

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Microsoft is not the company that comes to mind when you think about great design. Apple, perhaps, but not Microsoft.

But that may be changing, which we discovered when we looked back over 30 years of hardware designs from Microsoft. Although it took Redmond quite a while to get up to speed, its designs are starting to look pretty cool.

1980 – the Z80 SoftCard

Even though Microsoft’s hardware group wasn’t formed until 1982, the first hardware from Microsoft was introduced in 1980.

The Z80 SoftCard was a co-processor card for the Apple II computer. With it, an Apple II could run software written for the CP/M OS, which, at the time, had a big library of software. Titles like WordStar and dBase were suddenly available to Apple II users.

Picture courtesy of AppleLogic.org.

1983 – The Microsoft Mouse

The movie War Games premiered in 1983 as did Microsoft’s first mouse. “Microsoft, the people who set the standard for software, have done it again with the Microsoft Mouse,” read the ad for the Microsoft Mouse.

Picture courtesy of VintageComputing.com.

Looking at the first Microsoft Mouse today, we doubt many of you will feel that it was an example of great design. But put it against the first Apple mouse, and suddenly it doesn’t look so bad.

1994 – Microsoft Natural keyboard

Although it was not the first ergonomic keyboard, it was the first that was widely available and reasonably priced. In 1994, Microsoft unleashed the Natural Keyboard onto the world, and wrists everywhere breathed a sigh of relief.

1996 – Scroll wheel

Two years later, in 1996, Microsoft took another big step in hardware design and added the scroll wheel to its mouse. It’s safe to say that the computer mouse has not been the same since, whether it has “Microsoft” stamped on it or not.

Picture from U.S. Patent 5,912,661.

1999 – Optical mouse

Still focused more on functionality than great looks, Microsoft released the first commercial optical mouse at the end of the century. This made the input devices not just more accurate, but made them easier to clean, as well.

2001 – Xbox

Some people feel the original Xbox still is much better looking than the later 360 versions, and many of us as Pingdom would agree with that. The big and bold “X” featured heavily in all promotional material, and the design of the unit itself was rather striking.

2005 – Xbox 360

The follow-up to the Xbox from 2001 came in 2005 (isn’t it time Microsoft releases a new one?) It has iterated numerous times since then, with different models and designs.

2006 – Microsoft Zune

The Zune digital media player was introduced in 2006, and the whole line was killed off in 2011. We think the first models may not have been that inspiring in terms of the design, but later models, like the Zune HD, matched the competition well in that department.

But why there was a Zune in chocolate brown color we never understood.

2006 – Vista Industrial Design Toolkit

Who would have thought the words “Vista” and design would go well together, other than with “bad” thrown in there. In 2006, before it introduced Windows Vista, Microsoft released the ”Vista Industrial Design Toolkit.” The job of creating the toolkit went to BMW Group Designworks USA, and its remit was to provide “PC designers with guidelines for creating hardware that visually connects with the Windows Vista software experience.”

Some of the design concepts it came up with look pretty cool. We just wish more of them made it into the market as shipping products. Not that it would have done much to improve the mostly miserable Windows Vista experience much.

Strictly speaking, this is not Microsoft hardware design, but we included it anyway because it shows what could have been.

2007 – The first LifeCam webcam

The first LifeCam was introduced in 2006 and it wasn’t much to look at. However, the current models are quite stunning, like the LifeCam studio you can see above. Clever use of different materials for feeling, look, and functionality, as well as striking lines and shapes. Who knew a webcam could look so good?

2008 – Microsoft Courier

The Courier was a Booklet that Microsoft started to develop but later cancelled. It would have featured dual-touchscreens in a fold-up fashion as well as dual cameras. Considering that it was supposedly in development 2008-2010, it would be interesting to find out what effect, if any, the introduction of Apple’s iPad in early 2010 had on the Courier project.

2010 – Microsoft Kin

The Kin was another ill-fated hardware project from Microsoft, which, like the Courier, had some pretty exciting design aspects to it. In contrast to the Courier, the Kin actually made it to market, but it was pulled after about two months due to poor sales.

2010 – Kinect

The functionality of the Kinect may seem like magic but the design? Perhaps not so much.

2010 – Arc Touch mouse

In recent years, Microsoft seems to have started to combine cool looks with practicality and usability. The Arc Touch Mouse is a great example of this. It not only looks fantastic, it also has some very innovative and clever solutions when it comes to functionality.

Metro

The pinnacle of Microsoft design may not be any piece of hardware it has ever put together, but the latest software it will introduce later this year: the Metro interface in Windows 8.

You may have noticed that we didn’t put a year next to Metro above, and that’s deliberate. At least some of the guidelines in Metro really saw the light of day in Microsoft’s Media Center as well as the Zune many years ago. Then in 2010 Windows Phone arrived, with Metro, but we think it’ll be with Windows 8, coming later this year, that Metro will be seen and used for the first time by most users.

After all, Metro has been described as “a design revolution at Microsoft.”

Best Microsoft design yet to come?

Even though Microsoft has created some stunning hardware designs it is as a software company it is best known.

There’s probably more Microsoft hardware, which we missed to include in this list.

What hardware can you think of that Microsoft has designed – cool looking or not – that we should have included?

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In this show, we talk to Nicolai Solling, Director of Technology Services at help AG, about security in general and firewalls in particular.

We discuss that Panda Security reported that in Q1 of 2012, 6 million new malware samples were created. We also mention the latest Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec, but we’ll cover it in more detail next week (send us questions or comments, please). Then, as the main focus of this show, we talk about firewalls for both home and enterprise users. We try to cover questions like what is a firewall, what should you think about when installing or configuring a firewall, and much, much more.

We have to apologize a bit for the sound on our end in this show – we made a slight error in the configuration of our setup. For next show, we’ll be much improved, we promise.

About the show

Pingdom’s Podcast is a show about Internet, web, security, mobile apps, and lots more. Every week guests from around the world join Pingdom to talk about what concerns and interests them. If you would like to be a guest on the show, get in touch.

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In just over two years, the share of web traffic in Asia that comes from mobile devices has almost tripled. In fact, in some countries, close to half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. India is very close to mobile traffic breaking 50% of all web traffic, and several other countries have already passed that benchmark.

Note (2012-05-10 3:39pm CET): We have amended the top 10 list below to reflect the most recent figures.

The world is changing, and it’s changing fast

If you look at the top countries in the world ranked by number of mobile phones, there’s little surprise that China is the number one, followed by India, United States, Brazil, and Indonesia.

But if we look at the percentage of users that go online with a mobile device compared to with a computer, the list changes.

In late 2010, we investigated what part of all web usage across the world was mobile, and we’ve done so again with the latest figures available. This is what it looks like right now:

Comparing the figures from 2010 to the current ones reveals a dramatic increase in just over two years:

We should point out that these numbers are percentages out of the total of web traffic and do not reflect any change in the absolute number of people or devices.

But by all accounts, mobile web traffic counted in absolute numbers is virtually exploding in the next few years.

Countries with largest mobile share of web traffic

When we dig a little deeper into this information, we find that, in several countries, mobile web traffic has already overtaken web traffic from computers.

Right now, the countries with the highest share of mobile traffic as part of total web traffic are (you can see the list that we’re basing this on here):

• 58.06% – Zimbabwe
• 57.89% – Nigeria
• 48.24% – India
• 45.32% – Sudan
• 44.24% – Zambia
• 42.77% – Uzbekistan
• 35.66% – Laos
• 35.48% – Malawi
• 34.05% – Brunei
• 27.68% – Libya

As you can see, Africa and Asia split the list between them. Africa amassed six countries, which left Asia with four. Over at The Next Web, Jon Russell recently predicted that mobile web traffic in India will overtake PC web traffic this year, which seems pretty likely to happen. That’s significant enough in and of itself due to the large population in India.

The first European country is the United Kingdom with 10.71%, and the U.S. showed 8.61% mobile web traffic as share of all web traffic.

It’s worth noting that Europe scored a 183.43% increase in mobile browsing share over this period, not that far behind Asia. But with the mobile share only increasing from 1.81% to 5.13%, Europe is still far behind both Africa and Asia when it comes to the percentage of users accessing the web using mobiles.

The trend is set to continue

Worldwide, mobiles only account for about 10% of web access, but it’s a figure that is growing fast. With some countries already passed 50% of web traffic coming from mobiles – with Zimbabwe in the lead – it’s safe to assume this development will only continue.

Clearly, people are taking to their mobile devices all over the world to get on the Internet, but more so in Africa and Asia than elsewhere.

This is a very interesting development to follow, and we’re sure to report on it in future articles.

Note about the data: We used data from StatCounter as the basis for our analysis. The data for 2012 covers the first seven days of May, 2012.

Hi-res graphics: The illustration above is available in a hi-res version.

Top picture: J. Henning Buchholz / Shutterstock.com.

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