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I was idly browsing browser (heh) market share graphs when I noticed there was a bump for Chrome in Asia.
None of the obvious countries had it, but I eventually traced it back to unlikely Vietnam. What happened there?! Why did Chrome crush all other browsers in may all of a sudden?
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/viet-nam
View the data by ”Browser Version” and it is revealed that Chrome 112, an old version, suddenly got popular. Doesn’t really seem to be something people would voluntarily chose to use, so there is something else going on.
Pure speculation: some popular product in Vietnam got a software update and is misidentified as Chrome 112, whereas before it was missing completely in the dataset. Maybe a iptv box or something.
Also pure speculation: this might be the user agent that any AI scraping bots are reporting to be.
IIRC there was a point in time that the version of chrome was being reported incorrectly a few years ago
Maybe nothing and Statscounter broke? Cloudflare reports entirely different numbers:
I couldn't find much yet for the reason, so I decided to look more at the bigger picture. The image you are looking at is just for Desktop Browsers, and it's main competitor was Coc Coc, another Chromium based browsers if you notice in the chart below they also took a huge dive in 2021. A little research shows that that big drop was caused by Google not allowing Google Account services to function properly within other browsers, once fixed.. it appears they got some of their users back. I have no evidence yet but assume something similar happened.
Note when it comes to mobile/console, whatever else safari still holds some users. So Google is slowly just beating Apple out of the market there. Coc coc hasn't released a Browser update since July 2024, so maybe they'll launch an update that fixes whatever broke and make another come back... But long term it doesn't look good for them
Edit: I noticed gpstatistics site apparently doesn't save the time when you use their save as png option, so for no x coordinates on the graph, on the first graph the 2021 marker is where coc coc hit near 0, then bounced back
commenting to remind me to check back when there's an answer
I want this answer too
WTH is Coc Coc?
From what I can recall, I think it's a Vietnamese company. I'll look it up and do an edit to this reply.
Edit:
It's a Vietnamese chromium based browser. No clue why it, alongside the others, dipped and chrome surged.
I am interested in this. Very odd. I imagine for that month, Vietnamese oriented sites only worked on Chrome. Not even Chromium either since Edge stopped working.
I'm interested in watching some Vietnamese twitch streamers to see if their browsers had issues during these times