Chrome Browser Usage Artificially Boosted, Says Microsoft

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?

Comments

I thought this was already refuted?

[Anonymous Coward]

StatCounter does not tally pre-loaded pages.

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[MyLongNickName]

This might be what you are referring to:

"Last month, Net Applications began removing Chrome prerendered browsing traffic from its statistics, noting that “prerendering in February 2012 accounted for 4.3% of Chrome's daily unique visitors.” In doing so Net Applications became the first company to adjust its data reports for websites"

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[MyLongNickName]

Ignore my sibling post, this is what I meant to grab:

"NOTE: StatCounter recently announced that they have updated their data as of May 1, 2012 to reflect prerendering in Chrome. However, there is no indication of either methodology or what percentage of Chrome share is being removed from StatCounter data."

Canadian stats

[GabboFlabbo]

Stats from a website which has mostly Canadian viewers:

Unique Users for the past 30 days
1.IE         66,554    42.21%
2.Safari     37,213    23.60%
3.Firefox    20,703    13.13%
4.Chrome     14,552    9.23%
5.Android    3,736    2.37%

*source: google analytics

Wikimedia stats agree with StatCounter

[David Gerard]

The Wikimedia browser stats pretty much match the StatCounter ones: 25.36% IE, 24.99% Chrome.

Note that Wikimedia is (a) a top-10 site with a broad general international readership (b) a charity with no direct interest in the question of "which browser wins?" but only in knowing the actual answers, so as to serve the readers.

Other sources agree with Statcounter

[INowRegretThesePosts]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser_market_share#Summary_table

In the data for April, only Net Applications put MSIE significant ahead of Google Chrome. The other 3 sources, on average, give *lower* usage of MSIE than Stat Counter.

bonch has this habit

[AliasMarlowe]

That's nothing, Facebook has this habit of paying people to troll Google on Slashdot!

Possibly not in this case. The person who posted the story was bonch, who appears to post questionable stuff in favor of MS and against Google.

Re:On The Other Hand, Could It Be...

[BZ]

1) The Android browser is not Chrome (different UA string, different JS engine, different WebKit version, etc).

2) Total smartphone internet usage is much much smaller than desktop usage, so numbers that measure usage as opposed to installs are still pretty desktop-dominated.