This article was published on November 28, 2012

Yandex launches tailored versions of its WebKit-powered browser in Turkey and Ukraine


Yandex launches tailored versions of its WebKit-powered browser in Turkey and Ukraine

Striving to increase its online search market share, Russian Internet giant Yandex has announced the deeply localized versions of its browser for Ukraine and Turkey, the company’s key markets.

The two tailor-made versions of WebKit-powered Yandex.Browser have been released almost two months after the product was initially launched in Russia. Now Ukrainian and Turkish users receive thoroughly localized services, including wizards, search suggestions, translation, and on-the-fly corrections of mistypes in the address field.

While the Turkish version supports only this language, the one for Ukraine is bilingual, allowing users to choose between interfaces in Russian and Ukrainian.

Both new versions of the browser have Yandex search built in, which is apparently one of the main reasons for their existence. With 28% share of the Ukrainian online search market and less than 2% of Turkish, the company actively pushes its services to local users. Recently, Yandex also became the default search engine on all Windows Phone 8 smartphones shipped to Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, and the other CIS countries.

Like the Russian version, browsers for Turkey and Ukraine both feature Opera Turbo technology, which compresses inbound traffic, making surfing with a weak data connection faster and less frustrating.

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Judging by the statistics shared by Yandex, releasing yet another web browser is not an entirely useless idea: in the first two weeks after its launch, the browser was downloaded more than 1 million times, with its share in Russia reaching 2.3%. This, however, doesn’t seem to affect Yandex’s share of the Russian online search market, which remains steady at about 60.5% for the last three months.

Yandex Browser for Ukraine | Yandex Browser for Turkey

Image credit: stock.xchng.

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