Net Applications Will No Longer Track the Browser Wars (venturebeat.com) 34
Emil Protalinski, reporting for VentureBeat: For more than a decade, I've used Net Applications' NetMarketShare tool to track the desktop browser and operating system markets. The monthly reports have been critical in gauging which browsers and new versions of operating systems are gaining or losing market share. Last week, Net Applications released its final NetMarketShare report. The loss could not come at a worse time. After Chrome cemented its spot as the world's de facto browser, there hasn't been a lot of movement. But that might be about to change. Chrome's creator, Google, is facing the biggest U.S. antitrust case in a generation. Mozilla, which depends on Google for almost all its revenue, is rightly worried about becoming "collateral damage."
[...] So why is Net Applications killing off NetMarketShare? Don't act surprised when I tell you the undisputed market leader has something to do with it. In January, Google proposed deprecating the User-Agent string (used to identify which browser and operating system is being used) as part of its war on fingerprinting. Net Applications says the change will break NetMarketShare's device detection technology and "cause inaccuracies for a long period of time." Add the ongoing problem of filtering out bots to prevent skewing of the result, and Net Applications decided it was best to throw in the towel after 14 years. Net Applications provided its reports based on data captured from 100 million sessions each month over thousands of websites.
[...] So why is Net Applications killing off NetMarketShare? Don't act surprised when I tell you the undisputed market leader has something to do with it. In January, Google proposed deprecating the User-Agent string (used to identify which browser and operating system is being used) as part of its war on fingerprinting. Net Applications says the change will break NetMarketShare's device detection technology and "cause inaccuracies for a long period of time." Add the ongoing problem of filtering out bots to prevent skewing of the result, and Net Applications decided it was best to throw in the towel after 14 years. Net Applications provided its reports based on data captured from 100 million sessions each month over thousands of websites.
A bit premature? (Score:2)
That only becomes a problem when they actually put that proposition into practice and I can't see anything in the article which suggests that they have done this.
Could be more of a problem - I have no idea how they identify themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
>> the ongoing problem of filtering out bots to prevent skewing of the result
>Could be more of a problem - I have no idea how they identify themselves.
Almost all bots identify themselves as a normal browser or a variant of such as so many sites have silly browser checks.
Re: (Score:2)
Internet Explorer is a piece of trash!
There, I started trash-talking related to the actual topic. I hope you're happy now.
Thank you very much, but ... (Score:3)
I'll wait until Netcraft confirms that Net Applications tracking of browsers is dead -- and that someone has nuked it from orbit, to be sure.
Was the user-agent string that accurate anyway? (Score:3)
I spoof mine all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
You should look at the Seamonkey Forum some time, a large number of sites do it. A prominent one is the Google search screen, apparently Facebook also has problems and Safeway joined the crowd a few days ago. Those are a few of the sites which don't recognise the browser and fail in some way.
Re: (Score:3)
If you were using the user-agent string to send custom CSS to Internet Explorer, you were doing it wrong. You should have been using IE-only conditional tags/comments [wikipedia.org].
Mozilla is already collateral suicide (Score:4, Interesting)
They systemanically killed off their distinctive features, in the goal to become Knockoff Chrome.
When they killed generic extensions, their fate was sealed. (Yes, a modern engine is nice, but you need to offer ALL the abilities of the old engine, before calling it release-ready. Nobody wants to downgrade to a beta. KDE4 taught us that.)
Now, on mobile, you cannot even use the normal add-on site! All it gives you, is a pre-selected set of fewer add-ons than you can count on one hand! At first I thought that MUST be me overlooking something, because it could not possibly be. But when I noticed that almost all the other key functions were missing too, including even a way to see past downloads, or go back in history more than one step at a time, I knew the writing on the wall.
But they catered to literally the dumbest possible usage pattern in all of browsers forever: Tab hoarders, too lazy to close tabs, rolling in their own 150-tab filth, and then complaining about memory usage and lack of structure, because apparently they've never ever heard of bookmark folders, and militantly refuse to do so too.
By introducing "collections"... Bookmark folders with state. Not all state, so don't expect it to actually be useful. But history and such. Like you could not have added that to bookmarks.
And by hiding actual bookmarks as much and making them as cumbersome to use as possible. By removing keyword searches on the desktop. By making generally all UI elements as annoying and badly designed as humany possible. Buut the URL bar is finally at the bottom, so Ooooh, Wooow, Much Innovate. Such Genius!
"Don't forget to upload everything to the wannabe data kraken-zilla though! Including your DNS requests! Who chooses their own DNS anyway? Businesses? Never heard of those. Thankfully, we ourselves have clearly never been one!"
</rant>
TL;DR: Firefox is already dead. And it wasn't Google. But being financed by Google is certainly the ironic cherry on top of that turd cupcake.
Re: (Score:1)
> it's still the best, especially on Android.
Nope. Those days are gone, and on Android those days never even came.
I tried. I really tried. Firefox Mobile was one of the first apps I installed on my tablet (Samsung Galaxy Note Pro) and phone (1+1, 1+5T and maybe even the Galaxy S3). I used it for years, but too many sites became unusable (solid black instead of text, etc.)
I still use Firefox derivatives on the desktop, but Kiwi on Android.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Some people actually need 150+ tabs. I continually switch back and forth between several tasks, each of which requires a dozen or two uniqu
Re: (Score:2)
So they only tracked people who accepted cookies? (Score:2)
And other third party crap like beacons, injected scripts, etc.
Because it sound like that.
Which would hide security-concious people, people with ad blockers, and browsers that have a built-in crap filter, and obviously make Chrome look like the dominating web browser. (E.g. in Germany, Firefox is AFAIK still the dominant browser, and everyone and their grandma [literally] has an ad blocker. Meaning they would never show up at Net Applications.)
Or what am I missing?
Re: (Score:2)
I think you are missing something.
The browser identifies itself on requests, the information it provides includes
- the browser/level used, optionally the browser/level it is based on
- the browser engine (Gecko/yyyymmdd for example)
- the OS (Windows NT 10.0 = Win 10)
- probably whether the OS is 32-bit or 64-bit
Looking at a Newsgroup I can see entries such as
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.5
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thu
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but you can't count individual users that way, only percentages of hits. You need cookies or another user-side storage to count unique ids.
Re: (Score:2)
IP addresses?
Of course I tend to use multiple browsers at once, mostly because of incompatibilities induced by browser sniffing.
Re: (Score:2)
Not just corporate users...
Virtually all mobile users are behind NAT.
Many new ISPS, or providers in developing countries are forced to use NAT too. You might have a million unique customers originating from a single IP.
Danger of monoculture (Score:4, Insightful)
Browser monoculture? What could possibly go wrong?
All these idiots who ignore the past and are all too anxious to repeat it. People never learn. Google is doing more "evil" with Chrome than Microsoft ever did with IE yet millennials and people with short-term memory loss are giving Google a pass on stuff that Microsoft got raked over the coals for. It's disgusting how many of my peers who should know better are die-hard Chrome fans and don't realize the harm they're doing by being a free Google shill and promoting it.
At this point I don't care if Firefox is better than Chrome or if Chrome is better than Firefox. The world needs Firefox to exist and be supported, for the sake of the future of the internet.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/... [theverge.com]
Re:Danger of monoculture (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically it's a monoculture of Free Software, at that.
Because KHTML, which is LGPL begot WebKit, which Chrome forked for Blink.
And Microsoft tried and failed with Trident (Internet Explorer) and Edge, so they switched to Blink. And Apple is still using WebKit, which is still family to Blink.
So now we're down to two open source engines - Gecko and WebKit/Blink. Perhaps Firefox and Mozilla really need to sit down and think and solve the pain points of Firefox. There are many, and they've been ignored so long people gave up in favor of Chrome. Most of Firefox's problems were self inflicted, after all and ignoring them not only didn't make them go away, but made people switch.
The world may need Firefox, but Mozilla certainly isn't giving the world any reason to. It's been hard to be a firefox supporter when the pain keeps coming, and eventually people just give up and head to the hills because it's much less painful that way.
Re: (Score:2)
Browser monoculture? What could possibly go wrong?
Monocultures are bad, yes, but that's not what this is about. They're not dropping tracking because there isn't anything to track, they're dropping it because the data they used to track it is no longer being provided (for good reasons).
Re: (Score:1)
They're the smallest of the three monitoring compa (Score:2)
So? (Score:2)
Google faces Antitrust allegations. So? People don't care. Unless the outcome of the case is something that actively causes functionality from Chrome to be lost why would people even consider moving off the platform if they haven't thus far?
Kids nowadays (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Remember Netscape 3 vs Internet Explorer 3?
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
Firefox's source of income (Score:2)
The Web is dying anyhow (Score:2)
Browser engines today are far to complex to be actual Free Software. While you usually can get the source code today, it takes a large corporation to effectively maintain it. Single persons, or small groups of persons simply don't have the manpower to make any meaningful changes.
In the past we had Mozilla as an extremely well founded corporation developing browsers. However since then their interests have diverged a lot from the ones of their users.
What we need to think about now is how potential successors