Canadians spend more time online than anyone in the world, thanks in large part to people over 55, according to a new report.
Web research firm ComScore released the report, which shows Canadians spent, on average, 43.5 hours online between October and December 2010 -- more than twice the worldwide average.
The U.S. came in second with an average of 35.5 hours per user in the fourth quarter, followed by the U.K. with 32.3 hours and South Korea with 27.7 hours.
Canada, which was also the world's top Internet-using country in 2009, has seen a steady increase in Internet usage since then, rising 2% between December 2009 and December 2010.
The biggest growth is coming from older Canadians. While Internet use among most age groups has remained about the same, it's gone up 12% between 2009 and 2010 for those 55 and up. In the fourth quarter of 2010, about 4.7 million of Canada's 23 million Internet users were over 55.
The regional breakdown of Internet users roughly matches Canada's population. Ontarians, for example, made up 38% of the country's users in 2010, a self-explanatory figure in a province that contains 38.7% of the country's population.
Gender made no difference when it came to Internet usage, with male and female users split almost evenly across all age groups.
Gender did, however, impact what people did with their time online. Online directory use among male users more than tripled, while visits to photography sites and computer software sites doubled.
For women, visits to photography and directory sites both doubled, as did visits to health and beauty sites, and gay and lesbian sites.
More Canadians are spending time on social networking sites and blogs, with visits to each jumping 13% and 9%, respectively, between 2009 and 2010. Facebook was the most popular in these two categories, followed by Blogger sites and Windows Live profiles.
Internet Explorer is Canada's most popular browser, with more than 23 million users in December 2010, followed by Firefox with 7.7 million and Google Chrome with six million.
Canadians spent most of their online time looking things up on search engines, browsing technology sites, reading newspapers and catching up on entertainment and movie news.
Political news sites saw the biggest growth in the fourth quarter, with total unique visitors up 47%. Coupon sites also saw big growth, up 37% from the previous year.