Slashdot Mirror
StatCounter Blasts Microsoft's Claim About IE Still Being the Number 1 Browser
An anonymous reader writes "Do you remember when Microsoft tried to claim that Internet Explorer was still the most-used browser by accusing StatCounter of using a flawed methodology? Well, StatCounter has just posted a response that walks through a number of errors and omissions in Microsoft's reasoning. They (rather politely) explain the importance of sample size, discuss the value of page view counts versus unique visitor counts, and explain the difference between their methodology and that of Net Applications."
So if we're going to defend their browser stas then we're also going to stop denying their stats at show Linux has about 1-2% marketshare, right?
MSucks can suck iEggs.
My web site stat counter proves that Macintosh PowerBooks running Safari 4.1.1 are the most common machines and browser combination. The evidence is right there in the logs. Virtually no IE usage at all. Just once in a while when I test that a new page renders properly in IE.
Statistically significant sample sets are raaather important. :)
It matters to the people who like to use these stats when they show negative things about Microsoft. But when the same source publishes stats that show Linux has less than 2% marketshare they decry the source as being untrustworthy.
So, the pissing contest is still going on? Who would have thought.
237 out of 237 Microsoft employees recommend Internet Explorer
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election...
I was, at least, interested in the bit about why they use Page Views instead of Unique Visitors. My initial reaction would have been to side with Microsoft with the Unique Visitors metric, but StatCounter makes a great case...
- Person opens IE on a machine (for whatever reason) and uses a site that's part of their network. Let's call it five pageviews.
- Then they close IE and use Chrome or Firefox for 500 more pageviews, to every other site, for the rest of the day.
Now using Uniques, you'd show that person as an IE user. Or at maybe you'd 50/50 it. Both methods poorly represent that person's browser usage than the total pageviews by browser. It's not perfect, but it does make sense.
Their youtube video makes it quite clear, and it's good that they did this.
What's the actual truth?
You see, SC comes up with a moderately intelligent article that does seem, in the face of it, to address the points Microsoft addresses.
And yet, virtually anyone who administers a public website can tell you that SC's original figures are complete crap. IE most certainly is the most popular browser right now. And Chome is third place. Not second. Definitely not first.
SC can continue to push this ludicrous crap if they want. But their figures are laughable, and they'd be better off figuring why than writing snippy retorts to anyone who points it out.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Their commercials make IE9 look cool. They have all my non-tech friends convinced its a great browser... :rollingeyes:
Progress defines me
Statcounter. It is very possible that you will get a reply from Microsoft spin doctors saying you are complete wrong because you are not considering the chicken population at China. Do not reply anymore, it just an effort to make you waist more resources answering to their non-sense.
Your write!
Vi vs eMacs; steal gauge match!
I drank what? -- Socrates
If you do any web development, these browser stats control how much testing and effort you have to spend supporting various browsers. IE unfortunately is difficult to work with as the "standards" they choose to implement often work differently than the standards that Firefox, WebKit and others use.
Stat Counter probably counts all devices and there is a ton of these things called Android that uses Chrome.
Yes, but this is a relatively unusual workflow. Even as a power user, the only time I ever launch a different browser is when I'm testing a website to make sure it works in another browser. Unless you use some particular site that works correctly only in a particular browser, most people simply do not use multiple browsers on a regular basis, and sites that work correctly in only a single browser should be excluded from this sort of statistic anyway. So basically, the benefit they're claiming is better precision for the 0.5% of people who have intranet sites that are IE6-only and then forget to switch browsers when visiting a web page initially. It's lost in the noise. More to the point, because those people forgot to switch browsers, they don't really care which browser they use, so as far as web developers go (deciding how important it is to support a given browser), they really are 50-50 because your site could support one or the other, and those users wouldn't really care which.
By contrast, most people use only a single browser. Thus, for the 99% case, if there are differences between the page count stat and the per-user stat, this tells you that people who use certain browsers tend to look at fewer pages. This may be an indication that the browser sucks, but it also may be an indication that your site does not support that browser well enough, or it may be an indication that the sorts of users who use that browser are simply too busy to spend time browsing a lot of sites. Thus, the two numbers provide significantly different information, and the question of which one is more useful is largely dependent on why you are asking the question. If you are trying to find out how many people will hit your site with a given browser, the per-user stat is more useful. If you are trying to figure out which browser is more likely to have people browsing around your site and looking for products, the per-page-hit stat is more useful. Understanding the differences between the two metrics can also help you better tailor your site to the sorts of users that browse it using different varieties of browser.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Based off the link you posted above, from an article submitted three years ago?
People change. People's opinions change, especially with articles like this that illuminate the different methodologies and reasoning. Different people exist on the website.
Not to mention that there could be entirely valid reasons why the StatCounter stats could be entirely correct in this case and still be flawed in the determination of the OS share.
I'm not sure why you're trying to create doubt and controversy here.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
I read through the stat counter article, and I was generally displeased with the heavy handed tone, and the general "this is the ONLY way to do it" attitude by the stats counter author. It's kind of odd defending Microsoft, but I think they have some decent points.
I'm a web developer, and frankly both metrics are useful to me. Why? Page views you already made a good case for, but when I develop a site, I need to know how many people are going to be pissed off when their browser doesn't work on my site. If a browser doesn't work on my site, and the user just leaves because of it, that isn't really offset by the fact that some other user on a different browser goes through the site more. So I heavily disagree with the idea presented by stats counter that the ONLY thing that matters is page views.
AccountKiller
I am working on a site and trying to learn web development for a corporate and business oriented market.
IE 6 != Chrome/FF and it has radical implications on how to develop resources. It is not oh, IE does this a little different, I will just add this to a .css then the problem will go away etc. Rather I have to redesign the site from scratch, I have to worry about support calls if the javascript is too slow.
It may mean I can't use JQuery to write once run everywhere as IE 6,7, and 8 will run like molasses and the most recent versions are not compatible with IE 6.
As an IT support professional it means more malware when people run obsolete platforms like IE 7 and XP with an increase in help desk malware tickets by 200%!
If you can point out to the PHBs and beancounters that no one is using their crappy locked down solutions anyway they will be in a tough spot with corporate sites no longer rendering properly. Most webmasters and IT support pros pray for statistics that show IE dying! As soon as people stop bending over backwards to users such as yourself who think IE 6 is the same as Chrome we can finally get rid of that terrible monstrosity and move on to something modern.
http://saveie6.com/
I certainly believe statCounter as it it logical and things with NetMarket do not make sense like IE 6 going up 15% usage last January?? The statCounter shows smooth graphs with less variation and I agree that no one outside of slashdot runs linux.
I stopped using Linux in March 2011 after Gnome shell, Unity, and all the new browsers hit 6 week release cycles for security and bug fixes. Linux lost out for me and millions of users.
However, it kicks ass on the server. NetMarketshare does not even show Linux either.
I do not understand the obsession of Linux beating MS. I used to be in that crowd when Windows 98 was so problematic but those days are LONG gone. Linux never does just work if you do updates as the lack of ABIs with drivers and config files changing becomes a nightmare when you have 3k apps installed. I am seriously not trolling but just stating my experience as someone will say it works fine for me etc. Ubuntu is not kind with my laptop and older desktop.
Android and IOS are more consumer oriented and people running Linux servers should not be browsing websites on them.
http://saveie6.com/
Most people I know DO use multiple browsers. Hell, my girlfriend, a college student majoring in food science (not quite a tech field) has Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on her macbook -- and uses all three. Personally I ALWAYS have at least two browsers open -- Chromium and Firefox. Use it to have multiple sessions of the same website open; or because some pages load faster in one browser than another; or because it's easier to remember certain tabs are in Chromium while others are in Firefox, rather than having multiple windows or trying to scroll through dozens of tabs. And not a single one of those wouldn't apply to a casual user -- I'm not talking things like testing or debugging websites...though I commonly switch and add browsers for that too.
I think you may also be underestimating the cases of people switching over for a specific website, and then leaving that browser up for a while. I just graduated from PSU and can tell you that on their course management system (ANGEL -- which is used by several other universities) you can't do certain tasks from Firefox (like sending emails); other tasks won't work on Safari (don't remember specifics, since I don't own a mac.) So any student there who prefers Firefox or Safari will probably end up switching browsers frequently -- I know some people who have to do that multiple times a day. And this is generally from their home computer, so it's likely they'll continue surfing with that browser until they close it. My highschool's website didn't work on certain browsers. My current work webmail and portal system won't work on certain browsers -- and it's a freakin IT company! Point being, there's never been a time in my life when I DIDN'T need to switch browsers on a near daily basis, for reasons that have nothing to do with being a 'power user' or web developer. And I don't know a single college student -- business major, agriculture, engineering, whatever -- who doesn't have a preferred browser.
Of course, all of this does miss the point that they should be able to take that into account in their statistics. If you view a site 5 times in IE and 95 times in Firefox, add .95 to Firefox and .05 to IE. Statcounter has the data to do that...though I'll admit I haven't read this thing fully -- someone please enlighten me if they explain a reason they couldn't do that.
My issue with NetMarketshare is they only look at 40k websites and they have a tiny amount in China. They weigh it to try to makeup but the number in China is so small that variations are included in the data.
For example, Arstechnica said IE 6 usage is up by 15%! Then it mysteriously goes back down by an equal amount. Then goes back up next month by 11%. Most IE 6 users are in China and not in the US (contrary to popular belief on slashdot that corps make it up). So if you have such a tiny sampling size in China who owns most of all IE 6 users you will see strange statistics.
Now if you make an English website that means the statistics are useless as your boss might thing this means American websites and a surge in IE 6 usage means you need to work 70 hour work weeks for the next month downgrading your site to work with such a small marketshare of users.
Statcounter admitted they screwed up and fixed Chrome pre-rendering if you look at their site starting last month it takes this effect into account and Chrome lowered a little bit.
http://saveie6.com/
Even if you think of this (as another commenter has it) as a "unique workflow", I think it misses an even greater source of error in NetApplication's approach. Consider:
- My grandma uses IE as preloaded on her Windows PC and goes to, say, Gmail (yes, at least I got her off Hotmail :) once a day to get her cat pictures. She's counted as a single unique visitor by NetApp.
- I go to Gmail with Chrome in the morning and live on it all day, loading hundreds if not thousands of pages during that time. Despite that, I'm _still_ counted as a single unique visitor by NetApp. Even though the "eyeball time" (the real "browser usage") between me and grandma is vastly different.
I think the "single user" metric has an inherent biased towards low-usage, unsophisticated users - the ones most likely not to have replaced IE as loaded on their systems. So it makes sense (not even counting the geo-weighting issues) that they'd have IE's share much higher than anyone else's. Though no single approach is perfect, that's why I think of the two StatCounter's is netter. (And frankly it's always been more in line with other metrics - like the Wikimedia stats - that seem unbiased and cut a wide swath of the Net. NetApplications has always been the outlier.)
lol; "better" not "netter". Though that's that's probably true, too. :)
You are comparing two different things, the needs of 1 site, verses the usage across the net as a whole. It shouldn't be in the least surprising that the world wide numbers don't line up to the numbers any single site encounters, and using unique users world wide, or even within a country is equally useless in this regard as well. SC was never meant to meet the need of any single site to judge what browsers it will encounter other than as a starting guess. In fact, there is no metric out there that will be anything more than a guess. You have to measure that sort of thing yourself.
And I don't understand why people dish a whole OS just because one of the many desktop environments sucks.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
FYI: Net Applications =/= NetApp (formerly known as Network Appliance)
Or hell, just delete all the cookies.
Or browse in Privacy mode.
Then what do they have to track you?
The reality is that those numbers don't really matter if you already have a website.
You can easily run stats on YOUR OWN WEBSITE and get the browser breakdown that you should be worried about.
For one of my primary sites, all version of IE beat out Firefox or Chrome. When split apart, Firefox and Chrome are 1 and 2, with IE8 coming in third.
And now that I think about it, knowing who is first or second is pretty much irrelevant. What matters is the percentage of users who are still using browser version that suck to support. So really, what I care about is where my IE7 and IE6 usage is, and at what point is it okay for me to walk away from those users.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
but then there is also the embedded browser factor - I open my newsreader app and that counts as a IE page view, or I open my OSS dev tool and that counts as a webkit view.
Nowadays its not easy to really get anything other than a broad estimate of browser usage.
When did this site devolve to fanboy vs. shill?
Looking through past articles for the keyword FUD, I would say 2006. Obviously fanboy/shill articles show up as early as 2001, but aren't too frequent.
He effected a bored affect.
"Then what do they have to track you?"
Your unique system+browser configuration?
Yes, and most of them use that preferred browser nearly all the time. They don't just suddenly decide to switch to Safari for an hour, switch to Firefox for 10 minutes, then switch over to Chrome for a while, then switch back to IE.
I haven't used any browser other than Safari in more than five years except when dealing with one very specific website (a county government site), and even that site now works correctly in Safari. Your situation is unusual. Even most school websites work correctly with WebKit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) these days. They pretty much have to.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So stop using that site. If enough people say, "No", they'll fix it. As long as their users coddle them by switching browsers, there's no incentive for them to improve.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
(Gee, thanks for the civil reply. You gain a lot of karma points that way, I'm sure.)
In any case, the contention was not (if you read a bit more carefully) that a single-user metric should count the same user twice. Obviously. Rather, the argument is that at a single-user metric is not really a good one to measure 'market browser share' at all, because it overstates the usage by low-use, occasional users, and understates usage by high-use, constant users. As a website developer, sure, I'm interested in both per-visitor and per-page metrics - but the latter is much more important to me because it more accurately tallies who's using my site the most.
But since your position in Microsoft management is pretty secure, that distinction's probably not important to you.
IE is the number one browser... for downloading a better browser.
Procrastination; I'll think of a sig tomorrow.
I placed a number of goo.gl links in comments at various sites pointing to pages that would be interesting to the visitors there. goo.gl gives you among other things browser and os statistics. For all these pages, there were at least twice as many clicks from firefox than from IE. On most pages, IE came second behind Firefox, but in the more tech-oriented pages, IE was nearly always third after Firefox and Chrome. :)
You do not have to believe this -- just try it, it is rather easy, interesting and fun.
it may also be less biased than using the web stats for whatever site you may own, because that site you own is only visited by geeks anyways
Hit that site twice:
Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 2,250,982 tested so far.
Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 2,250,984 tested so far.
Kinda hard to track me if everytime I hit a site, I'm "unique"
I think one reason why IE is losing market share is the fact IE--unlike Firefox, Chrome and even Safari--lacks "on the fly" flagging of spelling errors. But now that IE 10.0 for Windows 7 (and the IE 10.0 built into Windows 8/RT) will flag spelling errors, we could see a lot less people in Windows 8 and Windows RT choose an alternate browser.
I have to take issue with StatCounter's claim that their data is inherently better because they have 3 million sites in their sample vs 40,000 in Net App's sample. Ask any statistician (I'm not one, but I do fiddle with stats from time to time) and he'll tell you that the only situation in which having more than 40,000 data points (and Net App had 40,000 sites of data points, meaning many millions of page views) can make any difference is if you're trying to tease out extremely subtle differences.
Regardless of the total size of the population you're trying to estimate, you only need a relatively small number of samples to get a given degree of certainty that your hypothesis is not invalidated by your data. This is why you see nationwide polls that only ask 2,000 people out of 300 million Americans -- because the math shows that's all you need to achieve a +-3% margin of error with a 95% confidence interval, and note that you can achieve the same accuracy with the same number if you randomly select 2000 people out of the seven billion on the planet. The margin of error depends on the sample size, not the population size. Once you're up to tens of thousands of samples, the margin of error is miniscule, and upping that to a few million samples doesn't appreciably improve your accuracy.
What does matter, a lot, is that your samples are randomly-selected. And the fact is that neither StatCounter nor Net App have a very good story to tell there. StatCounter's larger sample size may possibly help by getting a slightly larger cross-section of the web, but I doubt it. Both companies measure only a tiny slice of web usage, so complete coverage is a pipe dream, and both have way more than enough data to achieve highly accurate estimates -- if the data is well-sampled, which it isn't. If it were, their estimates would be identical to several decimal places.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
> Linux lost and its time to move on with Android and Windows.
Android is linux. A mangled fucked up linux for simpletons, but then again so were other environments, so let's not single it out for that.
You're either an idiot or a troll. Neither of which does anything apart from reduce the signal to noise ratio here.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
The other bias, are indirect or unintentional usage of a browser, and this is mostly IE...
The fact that IE is still installed wether you use it or not, while few people will install chrome or firefox unless they intend to use it.
Applications which embed a browser within the app, there are a few that use chrome etc, but most use IE.
Applications which call an external browser (eg to view a link), some are hard coded to run ie, some just use the default browser but then ie has a habit of being set back as the default even if you don't want it.
If you just go based on unique users, then many chrome or firefox users would also be counted as ie users despite never intentionally invoking ie.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Heh, you credibility suffers the way you compare a temporary problem with KDE4.0 - 4.2 with the design of Android.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I would hazard a guess that the number of people that actually use multiple web browsers in the manner you describe to be a small minority, it seems that in order to cater for the small minority they are significantly twisting their numbers. No matter how you look at it all the stat collectors are all just approximations, but I do think in this case Microsofts view still holds more water than statCounters.
StatCounter is Freemium while NetApps is paid only; meaning that NetApps have a bias towards for-profit sites?
As you said yourself, random samples are important and I'd say a bigger number of websites can help in this regard, especially since there are significant differences between browser usage based on countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
A bigger biased sample is still biased, unless your sample is so large that it actually covers close to all of the population. What would be more useful is to understand what the biases are, and then try to adjust for them. muxxa pointed out that Net Apps is a paid-only service, which undoubtedly accounts for some of the bias.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
... and StatCounter has a bias towards small sites.
Swilden's point is spot on. Arguing over the specific percentages produced by NetApps and StatCounter is useless since neither can remotely claim to provide a random sampling of websites. The stats are useful to see overall trends in browser usage, but that's about it.
I will take an OS that just works with a gui that works and helps me be productive any day. Android is great for tablets and I so not see the problem with using it on netbooks. I can find things with it that I can't with KDE.
http://saveie6.com/