This petition is gaining some steam! Please share it with anyone you think might be interested! We can show Nintendo that we want to be able to use the browser on the Switch. Like I said last time, they've already done the hard part and made it, just expose it to the user!
In this update, I want to over some of the feedback that we've received from users of our Switch landing page + DNS server. This is opt-in feedback from filling out our survey. Which means, I would consider this to be the "vocal minority" of users.
To clarify, using our landing page is one method of currently accessing the hidden browser on the Switch. This is accomplished by entering 45.55.142.122 as your DNS server in settings.
To follow along, the charts I'm going to go over are all in one Imgur post here: https://imgur.com/a/jP5r8e6
Each category below will go in order from the Imgur link. This survey was initially posted Dec 15th, 2017 and today's date is June 3rd, 2020. So this is about 2.5 years worth of responses
How often users use this service
The first question is a bit of a sanity test, 11.4% of the 22,000 responses said that they do not use the service. This service is primarily accessible via the landing page, so this helps inform us about bad data.
The answers for how frequently people use the browser via this method are pretty across the board. 57.6% of respondents use it daily to a few times a week! That's more than 10,000 people that we're talking about.
With numbers like that just from people who filled out the survey, you have to wonder what kind of important stuff people are getting done on their devices. Accessing the Internet is a matter of access to information, and the more devices and easier that is for people, the better their lives can become.
Where our users are located
A majority of our users (85.9% of respondents) are in North America or Europe. There are then smaller factions for South America (6.3%), Asia (4%), and Australia (2.4%). Since we primarily post in English spaces, it makes sense that primarily English-speaking places are most of our users.
It probably also doesn't help that the entire survey is in English... Even with this percent breakdown though, if even a handful of people are using their Switch to browse Internet that they otherwise wouldn't be able to access, that's a huge win. We want Nintendo to see that as a win as well.
For instance, if you don't have that many Internet-enabled devices in your household, having a browser on your Switch stops becoming a matter of convenience and becomes a matter of accessibility/education. I'm not trying to oversell our relatively small role here, but if Nintendo opened the gates you know that people that need to use it, would use it!
Would you be interested in Nintendo adding a browser to the home menu in the future
Here's a very relevant question for this survey! 91.5% of respondents say YES. Of course, I'm preaching to the choir with this question, but that's a big deal! This should be a marketable opportunity for Nintendo. Why not allow users to access this browser?
The follow up question is even more revealing for how people feel... "Do you think they will?" is met with 32.5% Yes, 22.7% No, 44.8% Maybe.
What websites do you want to access?
No chart for this question, but some of the top answers are just about what you'd expect. Discord (doesn't currently work due to older webkit version), Roblox, Youtube, and a lot of people asking for cookies to persist to save their progress. We also (of course) have a lot of complaints about the added timeout functionality (discussed in previous post).
There are such small quality-of-life improvements Nintendo could make to this browser that would easily allow it to be a selling point of the Switch!
There are a few other statistics in the Imgur link. Tell more people! Let's show Nintendo what we want. Thanks for taking the time to read this!