The Internet Explorer 'Exclusive' in Turkey Our Turkish nephew Yankı Sungar owns an Internet-based company in Izmir called EkoNet (which is a word-play on the English meaning of his first name). And he's a Microsoft Internet Explorer user, exclusively -- for reasons we'll explain below. Yankı's Internet sales portal website (which is optimized for Internet Explorer 6) is interesting because it includes 'trailer movies' to illustrate his company's capabilities -- along with testimonials (some also on film) of work he's done for satisfied customers (e.g. Netsis, Oracle, BMW). And his site gets a lot of Turkish Internet traffic and attention... So, why the Internet Explorer exclusivity, Yankı? One of the many interesting bits of information provided by our website statistics application (CPanel) is that more than 11% of LPT's English-speaking site-visitors use the Firefox browser -- which puts that browser in distant (but still respectable) second place behind Internet Explorer in popularity among our site-visitors. Those two browsers together account for almost 94% of LPT's English-speaking 'surfers'. The other 6% of site-visitors (in decreasing order) browse LPT using: Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Real Player, Konqueror, and Firebird [Old Firefox]. Quite a healthy variety, isn't it... But, in Turkey, those other Browsers are given very short shrift by Internet-surfing Turks -- either because they aren't available in Turkish versions or because available versions don't support the complete range of IE capabilities (e.g. I can't consistently access my CPanel Stats with FireFox, only with IE6). And until such versions appear, that's the way it's gonna stay. In the meantime, only a few Turkish website builders bother to cater for other-browser differences -- and the Turkish Edition of Microsoft Internet Explorer remains King! Update 17 June 2007: FireFox, for one, has been improved a lot since we wrote the above in June of 2006. We can now read our CPanel Stats with it, for example. But, we still encounter websites that FireFox can't navigate as well as Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Still... we personally have so many general complaints about IE 7, that we prefer using the new FireFox (current version 2.0.0.4) for most jobs -- and only use IE 7 when absolutely necessary. But...we notice from our website statistics, that about 80% of LPT site visitors still prefer IE. Still...that's down from IE's more dominant 88% share in June 2006.