StatCounter Blasts Microsoft's Claim About IE Still Being the Number 1 Browser 160
An anonymous reader writes "Do you remember when Microsoft tried to claim that Internet Explorer was still the most-used browser by accusing StatCounter of using a flawed methodology? Well, StatCounter has just posted a response that walks through a number of errors and omissions in Microsoft's reasoning. They (rather politely) explain the importance of sample size, discuss the value of page view counts versus unique visitor counts, and explain the difference between their methodology and that of Net Applications."
Ok... (Score:1, Insightful)
So if we're going to defend their browser stas then we're also going to stop denying their stats at show Linux has about 1-2% marketshare, right?
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
That seems about right for linux desktop market share. Who is claiming it is not?
Now claiming that includes all the servers out there can't be right.
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Slashdot. [slashdot.org]
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Slashdot. [slashdot.org]
"Microsoft Sees Linux As Bigger Competitor Than Apple"
"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed a slide showing, from Microsoft's internal analysis, that Linux client use is clearly ahead of Apple's."
When the fuck did Slashdot become exactly equivalent to Microsoft? I thought this was still a second-hand tech article aggregator and instant DDoS machine.
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So, from a unit count perspective, I hardly doubt that including the number of servers running Linux in the count is going to make a noticeable dent in the Linux market share statistic.
Ser
Re:Ok... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if you want to be pedantic, for ever PC sold these days, there are simply thousands of embedded devices sold - a market which is pretty much owned by Linux and *nix variants.
As for how many browse online? Hard to say, though most if not all the Android installs do.
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Wish there was a way to get good numbers of actual linux users vs windows vs mac users.
For one thing you have to also take into account cross over. I use linux on my personal machines. However I also have windows installs on vms and have windows machines I use at work and school.
Then again if you're talking about computers with a modern OS I'd be willing to bet that some form of the Unix family is on the vast majority of computers.
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That seems about right for linux desktop market share. Who is claiming it is not?
That would not seem about right and by any reasonable estimate is FAR too small. You must literally know nothing about Linux market share or even the commonly accepted, uber conservative numbers which are half a decade old. Even Valve and Unitity now estimates the Linux desktop to be *10%*, which is far, far larger than the commonly accepted and known to be too conservative value of 4%. Furthermore, more accurate numbers, several years old at this point, place it at roughly 1%-2% behind that of Apple. So bl
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> Let's face it, major game companies, game engine companies, and distribution companies are not going to bother with a mere fraction of 2% of the market.
Yeah, I guess that's why the unity game engine just released linux support...
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Well, 2% of the market is still a huge number of users...
It's also an area of the market that currently has very little competition, so you would sell proportionally more units.
And finally, making a port is considerably easier than writing from scratch... It may not be viable to write a game from scratch for this smaller market, but since a game is already written the additional effort of porting it may well be worth it. Especially if there's already a mac port, or if you make a half assed port using wine.
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Who is claiming it is not?
Microsoft.
In February 2009, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft presented a slide based on Microsoft's research; while it showed no figures, the pie chart depicted Linux and Apple as each having roughly 5–6% of home and business PCs.
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if Apple has 350 million iOS and Google has as many Androids, just how many fucking Windows PCs are there in the world?
700 million is a significant fraction of whatever number of PCs in the world...
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Hard to say how many Windows PCs are being retired every day, but given most corps work on somewhere between a 3-5yr lifecycle, it'd probably be a significant proportion of Microsoft's installed base.
W8 will probably accelerate the downwards slide.
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Last year, there were more smartphones sold [smartplanet.com] than PCs and tablets (yes, iPad included) combined. If you instead count tablets and smartphones together and separately from PCs, the difference becomes almost 2x.
Of course, these are sales numbers, not the absolute count to date.
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Can't compare the two.
Life span of computers in our work place (3 - 6 years, even up to 8 years if the user doesn't require serious horse power). I see most people replacing their mobile devices every 1 - 3 years.
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W8 will probably accelerate the downwards slide.
I wonder about that W8. Is it "wait" as in "we're behind schedule on this damned thing" or is it "weight" as in "it's bloated and not very nimble?"
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I think you don't get my point. A few hundred million Androids is more than "2% Linux systems" out there.
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It matters to the people who like to use these stats when they show negative things about Microsoft. But when the same source publishes stats that show Linux has less than 2% marketshare they decry the source as being untrustworthy.
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Based off the link you posted above, from an article submitted three years ago?
People change. People's opinions change, especially with articles like this that illuminate the different methodologies and reasoning. Different people exist on the website.
Not to mention that there could be entirely valid reasons why the StatCounter stats could be entirely correct in this case and still be flawed in the determination of the OS share.
I'm not sure why you're trying to create doubt and controversy here.
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I certainly believe statCounter as it it logical and things with NetMarket do not make sense like IE 6 going up 15% usage last January?? The statCounter shows smooth graphs with less variation and I agree that no one outside of slashdot runs linux.
I stopped using Linux in March 2011 after Gnome shell, Unity, and all the new browsers hit 6 week release cycles for security and bug fixes. Linux lost out for me and millions of users.
However, it kicks ass on the server. NetMarketshare does not even show Linux ei
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Android is linux. A mangled fucked up linux for simpletons, but then again so were other environments, so let's not single it out for that.
You're either an idiot or a troll. Neither of which does anything apart from reduce the signal to noise ratio here.
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I will take an OS that just works with a gui that works and helps me be productive any day. Android is great for tablets and I so not see the problem with using it on netbooks. I can find things with it that I can't with KDE.
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When did this site devolve to fanboy vs. shill?
Looking through past articles for the keyword FUD, I would say 2006. Obviously fanboy/shill articles show up as early as 2001, but aren't too frequent.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)
I was, at least, interested in the bit about why they use Page Views instead of Unique Visitors. My initial reaction would have been to side with Microsoft with the Unique Visitors metric, but StatCounter makes a great case...
- Person opens IE on a machine (for whatever reason) and uses a site that's part of their network. Let's call it five pageviews.
- Then they close IE and use Chrome or Firefox for 500 more pageviews, to every other site, for the rest of the day.
Now using Uniques, you'd show that person as an IE user. Or at maybe you'd 50/50 it. Both methods poorly represent that person's browser usage than the total pageviews by browser. It's not perfect, but it does make sense.
Their youtube video makes it quite clear, and it's good that they did this.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but this is a relatively unusual workflow. Even as a power user, the only time I ever launch a different browser is when I'm testing a website to make sure it works in another browser. Unless you use some particular site that works correctly only in a particular browser, most people simply do not use multiple browsers on a regular basis, and sites that work correctly in only a single browser should be excluded from this sort of statistic anyway. So basically, the benefit they're claiming is better precision for the 0.5% of people who have intranet sites that are IE6-only and then forget to switch browsers when visiting a web page initially. It's lost in the noise. More to the point, because those people forgot to switch browsers, they don't really care which browser they use, so as far as web developers go (deciding how important it is to support a given browser), they really are 50-50 because your site could support one or the other, and those users wouldn't really care which.
By contrast, most people use only a single browser. Thus, for the 99% case, if there are differences between the page count stat and the per-user stat, this tells you that people who use certain browsers tend to look at fewer pages. This may be an indication that the browser sucks, but it also may be an indication that your site does not support that browser well enough, or it may be an indication that the sorts of users who use that browser are simply too busy to spend time browsing a lot of sites. Thus, the two numbers provide significantly different information, and the question of which one is more useful is largely dependent on why you are asking the question. If you are trying to find out how many people will hit your site with a given browser, the per-user stat is more useful. If you are trying to figure out which browser is more likely to have people browsing around your site and looking for products, the per-page-hit stat is more useful. Understanding the differences between the two metrics can also help you better tailor your site to the sorts of users that browse it using different varieties of browser.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Informative)
Most people I know DO use multiple browsers. Hell, my girlfriend, a college student majoring in food science (not quite a tech field) has Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on her macbook -- and uses all three. Personally I ALWAYS have at least two browsers open -- Chromium and Firefox. Use it to have multiple sessions of the same website open; or because some pages load faster in one browser than another; or because it's easier to remember certain tabs are in Chromium while others are in Firefox, rather than having multiple windows or trying to scroll through dozens of tabs. And not a single one of those wouldn't apply to a casual user -- I'm not talking things like testing or debugging websites...though I commonly switch and add browsers for that too.
I think you may also be underestimating the cases of people switching over for a specific website, and then leaving that browser up for a while. I just graduated from PSU and can tell you that on their course management system (ANGEL -- which is used by several other universities) you can't do certain tasks from Firefox (like sending emails); other tasks won't work on Safari (don't remember specifics, since I don't own a mac.) So any student there who prefers Firefox or Safari will probably end up switching browsers frequently -- I know some people who have to do that multiple times a day. And this is generally from their home computer, so it's likely they'll continue surfing with that browser until they close it. My highschool's website didn't work on certain browsers. My current work webmail and portal system won't work on certain browsers -- and it's a freakin IT company! Point being, there's never been a time in my life when I DIDN'T need to switch browsers on a near daily basis, for reasons that have nothing to do with being a 'power user' or web developer. And I don't know a single college student -- business major, agriculture, engineering, whatever -- who doesn't have a preferred browser.
Of course, all of this does miss the point that they should be able to take that into account in their statistics. If you view a site 5 times in IE and 95 times in Firefox, add .95 to Firefox and .05 to IE. Statcounter has the data to do that...though I'll admit I haven't read this thing fully -- someone please enlighten me if they explain a reason they couldn't do that.
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Yes, and most of them use that preferred browser nearly all the time. They don't just suddenly decide to switch to Safari for an hour, switch to Firefox for 10 minutes, then switch over to Chrome for a while, then switch back to IE.
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So stop using that site. If enough people say, "No", they'll fix it. As long as their users coddle them by switching browsers, there's no incentive for them to improve.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
but then there is also the embedded browser factor - I open my newsreader app and that counts as a IE page view, or I open my OSS dev tool and that counts as a webkit view.
Nowadays its not easy to really get anything other than a broad estimate of browser usage.
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I read through the stat counter article, and I was generally displeased with the heavy handed tone, and the general "this is the ONLY way to do it" attitude by the stats counter author. It's kind of odd defending Microsoft, but I think they have some decent points.
I'm a web developer, and frankly both metrics are useful to me. Why? Page views you already made a good case for, but when I develop a site, I need to know how many people are going to be pissed off when their browser doesn't work on my site.
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My issue with NetMarketshare is they only look at 40k websites and they have a tiny amount in China. They weigh it to try to makeup but the number in China is so small that variations are included in the data.
For example, Arstechnica said IE 6 usage is up by 15%! Then it mysteriously goes back down by an equal amount. Then goes back up next month by 11%. Most IE 6 users are in China and not in the US (contrary to popular belief on slashdot that corps make it up). So if you have such a tiny sampling size in
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Even if you think of this (as another commenter has it) as a "unique workflow", I think it misses an even greater source of error in NetApplication's approach. Consider:
- My grandma uses IE as preloaded on her Windows PC and goes to, say, Gmail (yes, at least I got her off Hotmail :) once a day to get her cat pictures. She's counted as a single unique visitor by NetApp.
- I go to Gmail with Chrome in the morning and live on it all day, loading hundreds if not thousands of pages during that time. Despite that
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lol; "better" not "netter". Though that's that's probably true, too. :)
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FYI: Net Applications [netapplications.com] =/= NetApp [netapp.com] (formerly known as Network Appliance)
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The other bias, are indirect or unintentional usage of a browser, and this is mostly IE...
The fact that IE is still installed wether you use it or not, while few people will install chrome or firefox unless they intend to use it.
Applications which embed a browser within the app, there are a few that use chrome etc, but most use IE.
Applications which call an external browser (eg to view a link), some are hard coded to run ie, some just use the default browser but then ie has a habit of being set back as the
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(Gee, thanks for the civil reply. You gain a lot of karma points that way, I'm sure.)
In any case, the contention was not (if you read a bit more carefully) that a single-user metric should count the same user twice. Obviously. Rather, the argument is that at a single-user metric is not really a good one to measure 'market browser share' at all, because it overstates the usage by low-use, occasional users, and understates usage by high-use, constant users. As a website developer, sure, I'm interested in bot
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Karma lol, what a dipshit. My Karma is permed out at the max. THE MAX.
The contention was absolutely not that the single user metric was not useful - you were fucking crying about your grandma, a user, being counted the same as you, a user, in the single-user metric. The metric exists because people find it useful.
If it is not useful for your purposes then don't use it.
Please continue to accuse me of working for Microsoft, as if working for them would be a bad thing.
Grow up. You manage exactly 0 servers
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Or hell, just delete all the cookies.
Or browse in Privacy mode.
Then what do they have to track you?
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Your unique system+browser configuration? [eff.org]
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Hit that site twice:
Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 2,250,982 tested so far.
Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 2,250,984 tested so far.
Kinda hard to track me if everytime I hit a site, I'm "unique"
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Your write!
Vi vs eMacs; steal gauge match!
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Re:I care (Score:1)
I am working on a site and trying to learn web development for a corporate and business oriented market.
IE 6 != Chrome/FF and it has radical implications on how to develop resources. It is not oh, IE does this a little different, I will just add this to a .css then the problem will go away etc. Rather I have to redesign the site from scratch, I have to worry about support calls if the javascript is too slow.
It may mean I can't use JQuery to write once run everywhere as IE 6,7, and 8 will run like molasses a
Stats are fun (Score:1)
MSucks can suck iEggs.
My web site stat counter proves that Macintosh PowerBooks running Safari 4.1.1 are the most common machines and browser combination. The evidence is right there in the logs. Virtually no IE usage at all. Just once in a while when I test that a new page renders properly in IE.
Statistically significant sample sets are raaather important. :)
Still? (Score:2)
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The pissing contest will stop once everyone is done pissing. Since the pissing will never stop there will be no stop to the pissing contest.
As long as there are browsers there will be someone who cares which one is used the most.
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Sample size (Score:5, Insightful)
237 out of 237 Microsoft employees recommend Internet Explorer
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Well, even that is unbelievable, have you actually tried to USE Internet Explorer ?
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I wonder how many bots are using IE user agent strings this week.
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What a silly question - 3. The other 234 know what's good for them.
It kinda reminds me a lot of (Score:1)
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>>> anyone who administers a public website can tell you that SC's original figures are complete crap. IE most certainly is the most popular browser right now. And Chome is third place.
Citation please. Your sample size is what? 1?
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Re:OK, so you're both full of it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh wait, people will do just that. I'm sorry, but the dumbass is you. Unless you are operating under a definition of market share that allows for >100% when totaling IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and every other browser out there. Which.. in all honesty
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Considering WordPress.com alone has over 800 million views a week, stats available here [wordpress.com]. You've got a serious sampling problem. Your website is a niche which skews toward IE use.
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I'll make this a sample size of 2 then. With 590,703 unique visitors:
53.45% used IE
14.84% used Safari
13.57% used Firefox
12.54% used Chrome
4.04% used Android
0.45% used Opera
These were taken from a site with absolutely no technical background, and should have no bias towards any particular demographic. Whether stats counter is more correct or not globally or not, NetApp's numbers more closely resemble traffic we see, and therefore a more accurate source for us.
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Sorry, here's the top 10 with version numbers:
1. Internet Explorer 9.0 23.11%
2. Internet Explorer 8.0 22.04%
3. Internet Explorer 7.0 7.70%
4. Safari 7534.48.3 6.24%
5. Firefox 12.0 3.69%
6. Android Browser 533.1 3.49%
7. Firefox 11.0 3.01%
8. Chrome 19.0.1084.52 1.94%
9. Firefox 10.0.2 1.48%
10. Chrome 18.0.1025.168 1.43%
Although, I find version numbers fairly irrelevant for Firefox, Chrome, Safari as their version numbers cha
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Their sample size is still fucking tiny compared to the total number of active sites though, so if a sample size of two is "pulling shit out of your ass" so is a sample size of 3,000,000. And no, you can't disagree with that simply because you like StatCounter's conclusion.
Really, this argument will keep on going until Google announces their conclusion based on Search/Analytics/AdSense figures.
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And what exactly does your employer do? And is your site fully compatible with all of those browsers?
Also, why don't you parse your actual web logs instead of relying on a javascript bug for stats? There are a number of firefox extensions to block things like google analytics, and ofcourse any browser that has javascript disabled (eg firefox users with noscript) or simply doesn't support it won't show up in your stats either.
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(Maybe Opera, just on principle.)
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IE most certainly is the most popular browser
How about enslaved by IE. Popular implies people like to use IE, given a choice what would they use? How many people use IE because some site only works in IE .
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What's the actual truth?
You see, SC comes up with a moderately intelligent article that does seem, in the face of it, to address the points Microsoft addresses.
And yet, virtually anyone who administers a public website can tell you that SC's original figures are complete crap. IE most certainly is the most popular browser right now. And Chome is third place. Not second. Definitely not first.
SC can continue to push this ludicrous crap if they want. But their figures are laughable, and they'd be better off figuring why than writing snippy retorts to anyone who points it out.
According to slashdot, only 10% of users use IE 8 and everyone else uses Chrome/FF.
My blogsite (not linked) is tiny and dumb but shows only 5% use IE 8 too. It varies on your website's market. Consumer sites will back up SC and if your employer is SAP or something corporate guess what? 90% use IE which is no surprise. It doesn't mean SC is crap at all as they test consumer sites and pro sites. Most people at work do not browse the web as they are not getting paid too and only occasionally do it when the bos
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no. you were modded down because you made a sweeping statement ("virtually anyone") and then provided data for exactly one - yourself.
one != anyone, that's all.
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It is virtualy impossible for the figures of any public site to agree with the agregated share of browsers (whatever it is). Unless, of course, you are Google, but even then, you'll probably miss some IE users that didn't change their search bar.
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I host a variety of sites, primarily a mix of porn and tech oriented sites but with a few random company brochureware sites thrown in.
On the porn, IE is the most common browser but barely with 30%, firefox and chrome are both very close behind with 28% and 25% respectively.
On the other sites, firefox is the most common with 42%, chrome has half that on 20% and ie lags behind with 15%.. Safari and opera about about tied on 5.8% each.
This is based on unique visitors rather than number of hits, and as far as i
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And yet, virtually anyone who administers a public website can tell you that SC's original figures are complete crap. IE most certainly is the most popular browser right now. And Chome is third place. Not second. Definitely not first.
Citation needed. Your anecdote about your site is not evidence that a real study must be wrong.
Citation needed? Go run a fucking webserver and track the stats. Or look at any of the fucking evidence people have posted online or here.
This fucking generation is absolutely fucking useless. You never want to do any thinking or research, you just want to argue about the results. Someone posts evidence? "Hurr durr anecdotal sample size of one because I can't count".
So fuck off with that "citation needed" horse shit, especially when this fucking page is riddles with actual data and citations. How about
Advertising (Score:1)
Do not reply to SPIN DOCTORS (Score:1)
The reason is simple (Score:3)
Stat Counter probably counts all devices and there is a ton of these things called Android that uses Chrome.
Re:The reason is simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then what would you call it?
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Well should that be counted too?
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What about all AC's are lame. I just made that up, but seriously if stat counter didn't count that and it is only desktop systems, then it will take another one like maybe double click to verify their results because probably more people have smart phones than desktops these days. How would stat counter know the difference?
Reality: (Score:4, Insightful)
The reality is that those numbers don't really matter if you already have a website.
You can easily run stats on YOUR OWN WEBSITE and get the browser breakdown that you should be worried about.
For one of my primary sites, all version of IE beat out Firefox or Chrome. When split apart, Firefox and Chrome are 1 and 2, with IE8 coming in third.
And now that I think about it, knowing who is first or second is pretty much irrelevant. What matters is the percentage of users who are still using browser version that suck to support. So really, what I care about is where my IE7 and IE6 usage is, and at what point is it okay for me to walk away from those users.
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The reality is that those numbers don't really matter if you already have a website.
You can easily run stats on YOUR OWN WEBSITE and get the browser breakdown that you should be worried about.
If only life were that simple.
You need to know the breakdown for sites which compete for the same audience.
If your big budget news site is going head-to-head against CNN and Fox you have a serious problem if your top-ranking browser is Konquerer.
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I'm toying with the idea of dropping IE6 support, it's down to 2.8%.
What problems does IE7 cause you?
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"oh my god!! its full of bugs out there"
IE7 its much better than than IE6, but compared with IE8, firefox and chrome, it's very buggy, making harder to use the newest web technologies.
IE is the number one browser... (Score:1)
My own stats ... (Score:2)
I placed a number of goo.gl links in comments at various sites pointing to pages that would be interesting to the visitors there. goo.gl gives you among other things browser and os statistics. For all these pages, there were at least twice as many clicks from firefox than from IE. On most pages, IE came second behind Firefox, but in the more tech-oriented pages, IE was nearly always third after Firefox and Chrome.
You do not have to believe this -- just try it, it is rather easy, interesting and fun.
it may
Will IE 10.0 bring users back? (Score:2)
I think one reason why IE is losing market share is the fact IE--unlike Firefox, Chrome and even Safari--lacks "on the fly" flagging of spelling errors. But now that IE 10.0 for Windows 7 (and the IE 10.0 built into Windows 8/RT) will flag spelling errors, we could see a lot less people in Windows 8 and Windows RT choose an alternate browser.
StatCounter overstates importance of sample size (Score:3)
I have to take issue with StatCounter's claim that their data is inherently better because they have 3 million sites in their sample vs 40,000 in Net App's sample. Ask any statistician (I'm not one, but I do fiddle with stats from time to time) and he'll tell you that the only situation in which having more than 40,000 data points (and Net App had 40,000 sites of data points, meaning many millions of page views) can make any difference is if you're trying to tease out extremely subtle differences.
Regardless of the total size of the population you're trying to estimate, you only need a relatively small number of samples to get a given degree of certainty that your hypothesis is not invalidated by your data. This is why you see nationwide polls that only ask 2,000 people out of 300 million Americans -- because the math shows that's all you need to achieve a +-3% margin of error with a 95% confidence interval, and note that you can achieve the same accuracy with the same number if you randomly select 2000 people out of the seven billion on the planet. The margin of error depends on the sample size, not the population size. Once you're up to tens of thousands of samples, the margin of error is miniscule, and upping that to a few million samples doesn't appreciably improve your accuracy.
What does matter, a lot, is that your samples are randomly-selected. And the fact is that neither StatCounter nor Net App have a very good story to tell there. StatCounter's larger sample size may possibly help by getting a slightly larger cross-section of the web, but I doubt it. Both companies measure only a tiny slice of web usage, so complete coverage is a pipe dream, and both have way more than enough data to achieve highly accurate estimates -- if the data is well-sampled, which it isn't. If it were, their estimates would be identical to several decimal places.
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... and StatCounter has a bias towards small sites.
Swilden's point is spot on. Arguing over the specific percentages produced by NetApps and StatCounter is useless since neither can remotely claim to provide a random sampling of websites. The stats are useful to see overall trends in browser usage, but that's about it.
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As you said yourself, random samples are important and I'd say a bigger number of websites can help in this regard, especially since there are significant differences between browser usage based on countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [wikipedia.org]
A bigger biased sample is still biased, unless your sample is so large that it actually covers close to all of the population. What would be more useful is to understand what the biases are, and then try to adjust for them. muxxa pointed out that Net Apps is a paid-only service, which undoubtedly accounts for some of the bias.