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."

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[Moheeheeko]

Wait one fucking second

"bonch wites"

Theres our problem.

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.

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[cpu6502]

Do you think Microsoft cares? They just want to spin the story to cover-up IE's downfall, and don't care if they have to LIE about StatCounter's methodology (claiming they count preloads, when they don't).

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[BZ]

The problem is that we're rapidly moving back to the "works best" bullshit, but now with "Chrome" or "WebKit" in place of "IE"...

Re:I thought this was already refuted?

[MightyYar]

But this is inevitable... you will always have a feature-rich website that you test on a handful of "supported" configurations. If the UA doesn't match the supported configuration, you fall-back to a safe version of the site. You can't possibly test every configuration, and even if you could it wouldn't make any financial sense to do so.

I think it is unrealistic to ask, for instance, Google to just serve up the same page to everyone and let the non-conforming browsers fall by the wayside. They don't want to turn away advertisement targets.

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

[Xest]

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

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.

Re:Google has this habit

[Dishevel]

Before Steve Jobs died he met with Larry Page and offered advice.

I think that the advice given was "Fuck off and Die. I will destroy your asses from the grave!"
At least that is in line with everything we had heard him say about Google before.
Steve Jobs turned into a self entitled little fucking brat. Sad really. He started out as an awesome dude.
Then he got full of himself and decided he never needed a lic plate cause he was special. That he could park in handicapped spaces because "I am Steve Fucking Jobs".
I do not like ego driven assholes ever really. But Steve started so high in my opinion and went and got so low that I have a special place of hatred for him.

It really does not matter...

[hackula]

...Lynx rules all the browsers anyway.

Re:Wait a second

[MyLongNickName]

What's an "invisible tab?" I don't want to read the article, but I don't understand how it inflates the actual number of chrome users

I think you said it all right there...

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

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.

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.

Just adblock lowlives like StatCounter

[KiloByte]

You can't use a browser without adblock these days and retain sanity. And unless you decide to throw away your privacy, you'll block trackers like Google Analytics or StatCounter.

So join me on the mission: drive apparent Firefox usage stats to 0.

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.

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.