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Chrome Browser Usage Artificially Boosted, Says Microsoft

Posted by timothy on from the depends-who's-counting dept.

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?

6 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. I thought this was already refuted? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    StatCounter does not tally pre-loaded pages.

    1. Re:I thought this was already refuted? by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Informative

      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"

      --
      See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    2. Re:I thought this was already refuted? by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Informative

      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."

      --
      See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
  2. Canadian stats by GabboFlabbo · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  3. Wikimedia stats agree with StatCounter by David+Gerard · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    http://rocknerd.co.uk
  4. Other sources agree with Statcounter by INowRegretThesePosts · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.