Chrome Browser Usage Artificially Boosted, Says Microsoft 272
bonch writes "Chrome was recently called the world's no.1 browser, but Microsoft is accusing the source, StatCounter, of using flawed methodology. When a user enters a search in Chrome, the browser preloads an invisible tab not shown to the user, and these were being counted by StatCounter. Net Applications, another usage tracking group, ignores these invisible tabs and reports IE at 54%, Firefox at 20.20%, and Chrome at 18.85%." Whereas the saturation of MSIE is totally organic, right?
Wait a second (Score:2, Insightful)
As usual, the summary makes no sense at all.
So, Google Chrome users who search on Google are counted as users, but they should not be counted?
Or, they are being counted twice? Or are they being counted for the number of tabs they have open?
What's an "invisible tab?" I don't want to read the article, but I don't understand how it inflates the actual number of chrome users. If the summary indicates what the article actually says, then there's no reason to discount these users, as they're not "actually not running Chrome"
Hanging chads!!!!
Re:Wait a second (Score:3, Insightful)
Chrome automatically loads some of the links on the page you are reading in the background, so that when you click on one of those links, it already has the page mostly ready. So when the user reads one page, "the web" sees several pages being loaded.
Slashdot 10 years later, what has changed. Microsoft still the evil empire, Google still the darling startup, and nobody can be bothered to read the article when it's about evil M$.
Re:Wait a second (Score:5, Insightful)
What's an "invisible tab?" I don't want to read the article, but I don't understand how it inflates the actual number of chrome users
I think you said it all right there...
Re:Google has this habit (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's not only Google, MS does similar things. Take their search engine. I don't know how many times I've been sent to Bing when clicking on a link not remotely related to Bing. Does anybody actually use Bing on purpose?
Every company is sleazy, including Google. Some are sleazier than others, of course (IMO the sleaziest tech company is Sony).
Just adblock lowlives like StatCounter (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't use a browser without adblock these days and retain sanity. And unless you decide to throw away your privacy, you'll block trackers like Google Analytics or StatCounter.
So join me on the mission: drive apparent Firefox usage stats to 0.
Re:I thought this was already refuted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think Microsoft cares? They just want to spin the story to cover-up IE's downfall, and don't care if they have to LIE about StatCounter's methodology (claiming they count preloads, when they don't).
Re:I thought this was already refuted? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that we're rapidly moving back to the "works best" bullshit, but now with "Chrome" or "WebKit" in place of "IE"...
Re:Google has this habit (Score:5, Insightful)
Before Steve Jobs died he met with Larry Page and offered advice.
I think that the advice given was "Fuck off and Die. I will destroy your asses from the grave!"
At least that is in line with everything we had heard him say about Google before.
Steve Jobs turned into a self entitled little fucking brat. Sad really. He started out as an awesome dude.
Then he got full of himself and decided he never needed a lic plate cause he was special. That he could park in handicapped spaces because "I am Steve Fucking Jobs".
I do not like ego driven assholes ever really. But Steve started so high in my opinion and went and got so low that I have a special place of hatred for him.
Re:I thought this was already refuted? (Score:4, Insightful)
Long time since I've seen that, and most sites where I see "works best" it's something like "Internet Explorer 5.5". Oh well.
I can't believe web sites nowadays can afford to have it work well in one browser, and not so well (missing bits/poor layout/whatever) in the rest. Because the most-used browser is only just over half of the users according to one set of statistics, and about a third of the users according to another set. So half or more of your users will see a degraded site.
Re:I thought this was already refuted? (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like you're the one spinning the story. The Microsoft blog post linked is from March 18 2012.
http://windowsteamblog.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2012/03/18/understanding-browser-usage-share-data.aspx [windowsteamblog.com]
Re:I thought this was already refuted? (Score:5, Insightful)
But this is inevitable... you will always have a feature-rich website that you test on a handful of "supported" configurations. If the UA doesn't match the supported configuration, you fall-back to a safe version of the site. You can't possibly test every configuration, and even if you could it wouldn't make any financial sense to do so.
I think it is unrealistic to ask, for instance, Google to just serve up the same page to everyone and let the non-conforming browsers fall by the wayside. They don't want to turn away advertisement targets.
Re:I thought this was already refuted? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought this was already refuted? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what's really annoying? The fact that all the Webit browsers identify themselves as "Apple Webkit" when it's really "KHTML", a product of KDE volunteers.