According to a recent report, approximately 620 million people in China use smartphone to go online.
A new official report from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has said that around 620 million people in the country – about half of its population – use their mobile phones in order to access the web.
These figures were collected throughout last year and represented the statistics as of the end of December 2015.
This figure represents an increase of 63.03 million users of mobile phones for accessing the internet, last year. It is also a figure that represents about 90.1 percent of the total number of internet users in China, which is estimated to be 688 million. This helps to further illustrate the importance of mobile devices as a driver in the internet user population in China. Smartphones have allowed the country to achieve the highest internet using population in the world, by far, said the CNNIC.
That said, it is important to note that the users of those mobile phones experience the same online restrictions.
The Chinese government imposes strict controls over the content that is permitted online. Despite the fact that e-commerce is among the core components of its efforts to convert its economy into one that is more consumer demand based, these regulations remain. In fact, the system currently in place has been called the “Great Firewall of China”, blocking out any content it has determined to be politically sensitive.
The CNNIC report showed that there are about 127 million people in China whose internet access is exclusively over mobile phones. Broad efforts have been made within the country in order to help to boost the internet coverage and, as a result, public services, the standard of living and e-commerce have all benefitted.
The statistics offered by the report have predicted that the number of people who are using mobile health, mobile wallets or online education over smartphones had reached the 152 million, 358 million and 110 million mark, respectively, last year. Furthermore, an estimated 96.6 million people in the country – that is, one in every 14 people in China – used a mobile device in order to call a cab in 2015.
According to the founder of Mozilla, the app currently under development will stop advertising by default.
One of the founders of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, who is also the creator of JavaScript, has announced that there is a Firefox mobile browser in the works which will be called Brave and that will provide users with a browser that will block all ads by default.
In a recent blog post in which Brave, as a company, was launched, Eich described the reason for this product.
Eich explained that he feels that there is a “primal threat” that currently exists in the current internet situation as a result of the disruption of the typical free, ad-supported web. Therefore, he is hoping to create a type of Firefox mobile version called Brave that will offer “a solution designed to avert war and give users the fair deal they deserve for coming to the web to browse and contribute.”
He explained that the Firefox mobile Brave version will be a first step in a new direction for the internet.
In Eich’s blog post, he explained that the development of this new browser is going to be accompanied by a “private cloud service with anonymous ads”. In this way, the Brave browsers will, by default, block all advertising including “initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising ‘dirty pipe’, impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals.”
That said, the mobile browser isn’t meant to stand out exclusively because of its ad blocking features. Eich also pointed out that it is being designed to be a “browser-based ad-tech platform.” In this way, it will be removing all ads and, once they’re gone, Brave will place a small number of standard-sized spaces onto web pages through the use of a cloud robot. This will allow the browser to insert its own ads that will be targeted through the use of “browser-side intent signals phrased in standard vocabulary”. They won’t use either persistent cookies or user identification.
The hope is that this Brave Firefox mobile version will help to boost the privacy and speed of internet navigation over smartphones and tablets. This will because it will weed out data-consuming tracking software and ads. The claim from Brave is that this can create a load time that is up to four times better.
