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

Google has this habit

[PartOfElite]

It's not only Chrome - they try to inflate Google+ user count also, by counting every single Google service - including search engine and YouTube - as part of Google+. Then they boast user counts of like 100 million while the users have been nowhere near Google+ itself and it's perfectly clear there's not that kind of users. It's part of their marketing.

Re:Google has this habit

[spacepimp]

That is part of the misunderstanding people have about Google+. Google plus isn't a Facebook competitor. The way Google has been spinning it is that it is the integration of all of Googles services into a more central account base. Youtube, maps, gmail, google+ accounts, gchat, google music, have been consolidated. they are all part of Google+. People want it to be a street fight between Facebook and G+, so they see it for what they want it to be. You can argue that Google muddies the water by doing this, but to not streamline these services is counter intuitive, and difficult to manage.
Before Steve Jobs died he met with Larry Page and offered advice. Cutting the cruft and tying their products into a cohesive ecosystem are likely the advice he offered.

Re:Google has this habit

[Shadowmist]

That is part of the misunderstanding people have about Google+. Google plus isn't a Facebook competitor.

I remember that earlier versions of Picasa had options on sharing your photos with Facebook. Those options got yanked not that long before Google Plus was launched. So I don't think the idea of competing with Facebook is that far from the truth.

Re:Google has this habit

[spacepimp]

That is part of the misunderstanding people have about Google+. Google plus isn't a Facebook competitor.

I remember that earlier versions of Picasa had options on sharing your photos with Facebook. Those options got yanked not that long before Google Plus was launched. So I don't think the idea of competing with Facebook is that far from the truth.

I guess the wording could have been more precise on my part. let me restate it: Google+ isn't just a social network. It is the comprehensive unification of Google services into a more tightly knit ecosystem. Does it compete with Facebook? Yes, but in thinking of Google+ strictly a social network to compete with Facebook is missing the bigger picture. Maybe they will become more alike in the future as Facebook broadens it's scope.

but coming pre-loaded...

[ganjadude]

is not at all artificially inflating the numbers.

or what about MS specific webapps such as their CRM system? I mean I could see if opera were the company that was making the complaint.

On The Other Hand, Could It Be...

[EXTomar]

Could it be that Chrome is on every Android platform and Android is on a lot of things? Many more pieces of hardware than Windows Mobile. Although I am a little dubious of the claim that "Chrome is #1" the growth makes a lot of sense where it has nothing to do with "hidden tabs" but that the installbase has exploded.

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[Calos]

Huh? The whole point of the GGP's post was that they recognize that there are other statistics services and to point out that those other services also claim that they ignore "Google's inflating tricks" - which, regardless, are not tricks meant to fool stats but to make things faster.

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention the thing that has most likely got MSFT worried which is that....NOBODY CARES, they really don't. This is one thing I have to give Moz credit for, because even though I no longer use their browser (I use a Chromium variant call Dragon) they were the ones that FINALLY got websites away from the "works best in IE" bullshit.

Now it doesn't really matter WHAT you use, its all the same. They all render the same pages, they all have roughly the same behavior, so the only ones that care about this little pissing contest is the corps themselves. as far as the users are concerned they honestly don't give a shit if what they are using is IE, Chrome, FF, dragon, QTWeb, Opera, whatever, it all "just works" and for that I say thank fucking God that it does.

Preloading and employer filters

[Mr Z]

A tangentially related question: Has anyone gotten in trouble with violating their employer's Acceptable Use Policy due to browser preloading / precaching? Often, in search results or even certain news sites there are outbound links to places I'd never visit from work. But if Chrome (or even Firefox) is clicking those links behind my back, my IP address is in a corporate log somewhere as having "visited" that site, isn't it?

How are these preload/precache "hits" distinguished from normal hits? Obviously, if some of the sites are filtering these out, there's some way to tell them apart. At the same time, if the "hits" were noticeably different, there's always the chance the webserver would serve up different pages based on this difference.

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[gsnedders]

Except that's not the case. Go to any Google website in Opera: it looks different. Why? UA sniffing. Go to Facebook in Opera Mobile: it looks different. Why? UA sniffing.

In both cases Opera functions fine if you change the UA string. Sadly, evangelism isn't enough to fix everything.

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[Scarred Intellect]

Not to mention the thing that has most likely got MSFT worried which is that....NOBODY CARES, they really don't. This is one thing I have to give Moz credit for, because even though I no longer use their browser (I use a Chromium variant call Dragon) they were the ones that FINALLY got websites away from the "works best in IE" bullshit.

Now it doesn't really matter WHAT you use, its all the same. They all render the same pages, they all have roughly the same behavior, so the only ones that care about this little pissing contest is the corps themselves. as far as the users are concerned they honestly don't give a shit if what they are using is IE, Chrome, FF, dragon, QTWeb, Opera, whatever, it all "just works" and for that I say thank fucking God that it does.

Opera and Safari don't work for many of my school's intranet functions. Opera doesn't work for the FAFSA and a number of other scholarship applications (To be fair, the FAFSA works, but it isn't supported). They don't work for many job applications I've done. I think VONAPP through the VA doesn't render correctly. Hell, even my slashdot journal editing doesn't render correctly in Firefox, Chrome, or Opera (had to use IEx64 for it to render correctly). A great majority of websites work independent of the browser, as they should, but some still don't, and unfortunately for me and every student in the country, many of these are from our school or the government.

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[Lord_Jeremy]

Hah, I wish! I'm still designing pages that are compatible with IE5.5+ which means accounting for all sorts of annoying css render bugs. Even recent versions of IE exhibit things like the float overflow drop bugs. The IE developers seem to have this terrible notion that no matter what the CSS standard actually says, web designers and other web browsers are supposed to follow their lead as to how certain properties behave. That's what it seems like at least, considering the number of layout bugs that have been in every IE since around 5 to the latest versions.