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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?

3 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gotta love the commentary last sentence by squiggleslash · · Score: 1, Troll

    I kinda felt bad for the editor on that one. It felt like some school yard debate that ends with the loser saying "Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Yeah? Well, uh, at least I don't have a gay haircut".

    Come to think of it, I'm a little concerned our next President might be someone who once did actually debate like that.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  2. Re:I thought this was already refuted? by PartOfElite · · Score: 0, Troll

    Yep, it even says so in the summary. He doesn't get that there are more than one statistics services.

    It seems that Net Applications tracks more accurately too, because they ignore Google's inflating tricks:
    IE at 54%, Firefox at 20.20%, and Chrome at 18.85%

  3. Re:I thought this was already refuted? by PartOfElite · · Score: 1, Troll

    Actually, many manufacturers pre-load Chrome now as Google pays them to. It's extra revenue for them, just like pre-loading Norton trial and so on.

    On top of that Google also pays shareware and freeware authors to bundle Chrome in their installs, just like BonziBUDDY and all those other adware and spyware apps used to do.