IE8 falls below 25% market share, Firefox 15 passes 10% mark, Chrome loses users | Hacker News Reader

IE8 falls below 25% market share, Firefox 15 passes 10% mark, Chrome loses users

thenextweb.com

48 pointsdsr1246 comments

The wikipedia article on browser share does a good job of illustrating the fact that nobody really has any idea what's going on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...

At least we can conclude Chrome is probably somewhere between 19% and 35%.

Everybody knows what's going on. All you need to do to see the most relevant and accurate browser stats is to open up your own analytics panel.

global browser stats are virtually useless. the only stats that matter are the stats that correspond to your audience. depending on location, interest, age, market, or any myriad other factors, your chrome usage could vary by a lot more than 19-35%.

Yes, most definitely this. For instance small niche site I run mostly dealing with females 30-60 years of age, Chrome has 17%, Safari 18%, Firefox 22% and IE 36%.

The chart there is somewhat misleading. It says "Usage share of desktop browsers" but NetApplications measures users, not usage.

That by itself could explain most of the variation in the chart, and lead one to conclude that IE has lots of users, but some of them do little browsing (imagine a grandparent that checks email or their stocks once or twice a day) while Chrome has users that browse a lot.

Which is more important? Depends what question you are asking.

I don't know why they even included NetApplications in the statistics---it seems far off from everyone elses counters.

I can see why Chrome is loosing users. They're really close to loosing me now too. The rapid updates have had some strange quality control issues and being one version behind on Flash can be a pain.

I stopped using Chrome because I was never super excited about depending on Google for yet another crucial service, and Firefox seems to have gotten better lately (perhaps the competition has invigorated them).

I know that probably sounds paranoid, but at the end of the day, I would just rather rely on a nonprofit organization or OSS project for anything important, rather than a for-profit company... as long as the quality is comparable.

If you use Chromium then you'll be using an open-source browser. Chrome gets the bulk of its source code from Chromium, but there are some parts they can't include in the open-source distribution due to licensing restrictions.

However, that's a compromise, and it would be much nicer if it were open-source from the start.

I don't think there's a need to discuss it as some kind of frightening black box that nobody's too sure about, either. As far as is known, I believe Chrome - Chromium == Branding, MP3 codecs, Pepperflash, Foxit PDF reading libs. With flash, they have some kind of special arrangement with Adobe; with the other three, it seems like it amounts to licensing bullshit that's keeping their hands tied.

There used to be that RLZ usage tracking thingy, but IIRC it got taken out. I'm sure there's other stuff like auto-update and usage statistics-gathering components added to the Chrome build as well.

If I missed anything, please do point it out.

By the way, my goal isn't to warm people up to the proprietary Chrome build. My point is more to make people feel less like they're missing out by ditching it for the freer Chromium.

It definitely has to be acknowledged that from a security perspective, it must be assumed that Chrome contains back doors and "innocently neglected" security vulnerabilities for big brother in all his various incarnations.

So use Chromium, damnit!

Do you know if "Google Chrome Helper" is part of Chromium? It seems like it, but I couldn't find clear information either way.

In any case, Google Chrome Helper makes me trust Chrome even less. Your comment made me curious about it, and it turns out that once activated, it's perpetually open in the background, often maxing out the processor, and it can't be quit without uninstalling Chrome. Supposedly it's related to Google Cloud Print and/or Flash, but I had both disabled and the above was still true.

Makes the caution about potential backdoors/vulnerabilities seem that much more reasonable.

>It definitely has to be acknowledged that from a security perspective, it must be assumed that Chrome contains back doors and "innocently neglected" security vulnerabilities for big brother in all his various incarnations.

What?

I'm guessing they mean closed-source software should be presumed compromised.

Then that's tinfoil hattery and doesn't really seem like it adds to the discussion.

Loose = opposite of tight. Lose = opposite of win. Chrome is losing users and losing you.

I'm sure you meant well, but I know the difference...it was just a typo (or two).

Not to go too far off topic, but, one of the nicer elements of HN is its focus on literate conversation. I've found, that in my own writing, I too frequently misuse to/too, where/were, lose/loose - so communicating with colleagues and friends that expect me to hold my conversation to a higher standard then elsewhere on the net is appreciated.

It has the bonus effect of improving the literacy of my written conversation when I'm not on HN as well.

On at least one occasion you also mixed up then/than.

>so communicating with colleagues and friends that expect me to hold my conversation to a higher standard then elsewhere on the net is appreciated.

Thank You. :-)

Agreed, I actually appreciate the grammar correction (to an extend) when someone corrects me, since I usually learn about something I was doing wrong.

However, it is annoying to read everyone else getting corrected. I'm not sure how to solve that, maybe an email? But that seems to be more effort than it is worth for the person correcting.

P.S. Since it's always an issue: Your email needs to be in the 'about' field for others to see it. If you want others on HN to be able to contact you please check it now.

Since you appreciate it: it is 'to an extent'. 'extend' is a verb, 'extent' a noun. And both the original case and this one aren't about grammar, but about spelling :-)

One time is a typo, both times very probably means you didn't know the difference. Not that I care one way or the other since I automatically correct bad grammar as I read, but there are those here that feel it necessary to bring it to everyone's attention.

I completely agree. The latest version especially has rendered the browser nearly unusable for me (among many other things, pages just don't load, and the browser freezes constantly).

Seems a bit serious... I'm guessing they will resolve it soon?

Are you using the Chrome beta or dev channel? Or are these problems with the stable channel?

On Mac Chrome is working fine, but on Windows it seems to be completely screwed up these days. If you open multiple youtube windows, for example, it screws up pretty much every time you switch between windows - you have to minimize the window and uniconify it for it to render properly. This is pretty basic stuff.

Could be related to the lack of Google employees on Windows.

I think you're right. I mostly use OSX these days, but I also test my stuff on Windows a lot. Virtualbox makes it easy.

Chrome 22 on Ubuntu is garbage

Care to elaborate on that? I use Chrome on Ubuntu and have not noticed any problems since the update a week ago.

Standard release I'm fairly sure. Version 22.0.1229.79 m

Oh not Net Marketshare stats again...At least they are not adding iOS Safari market share anymore and then saying how Safari market share grew 200% in one month or something. Their stats are still misleading as hell, though. There's no way Chrome still has only 18% market share, which is even lower than Firefox.

I'd like to know how much the IE numbers would fall if they excluded China. Unfortunately, I'd need to pay money to get that data from their source.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...

Yep, China is a huge driver for IE6. Microsoft has the data you want: http://www.ie6countdown.com/

From the linked article:

"IE6 unfortunately somehow managed to gain 0.30 percentage points. Web developers can’t wait for it to fall below 5 percent, and then continue to drop, but it seems to be holding on for dear life."

Either China is still deploying new Windows XP instances (the last Windows that defaulted to IE6), or ...

As mtgx observes: "There's no way Chrome still has only 18% market share, which is even lower than Firefox." The numbers just don't make sense to me.

I thought it might be interesting to include our numbers, since they surprised me. We (https://circleci.com) make tools for web developers, so this is very much for early-adopters:

Chrome: 58%

Safari: 21%

Firefox: 9%

Android: 7.5%

Everyone else, including IE: < 0.5%

here's what we're seeing past 2 weeks (ecommerce site in the DIY/contractor home improvement sector):

ie9 - 23.7%

ff - 17.0%

ch - 15.0%

ie8 - 14.8%

ipad - 10.6%

sf - 8.5%

ie7 - 6.4%

ie6 - 2.4%

and - 0.8%

op - 0.5%

iphone - 0.2%

ie10 - 0.1%

*iphone and android phone stats are way off because we redirect to a dedicated mobile site for small screen sizes.

Am I the only one horribly confused by the math in these charts?

E.G. the second chart has FF at 20.08% and then has a breakout where they show FF15 at ~11%, FF14 at ~3.2%, FF13 at ~0.7%, and FF12 at ~1% Those add up to ~16% by my math... That leaves around 4% missing, I'm assuming in an "other" category, but I feel like leaving off "other" when it's your second largest grouping is bad presentation.

Anyone else have a less confused way of reading these graphs?

There are other, older Firefox versions that add up to the remainder. The same goes for the other browsers.

According to StatCounter, over the last three months, the standings are Chrome (33.87%), IE (32.53%), Firefox (22.99%), Safari (7.4%), Opera (1.66%), and the rest (1.55%).

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201207-201209-...

Note that StatCounter counts page views, while most other reports count unique visitors. Both are useful, but they can't be compared directly. The StatCounter numbers reflect which browsers have users that do more (or less) browsing than others.

There is a huge difference between losing users and losing market share, particularly in an industry characterized by steady overall growth.

Is there any evidence that Chrome has actually lost users, or has it simply not added as many as some competing browsers?

These stats and graphs are at least a bit misleading.

For the Firefox cross section they show

10.91 + 3.20 + 0.72 + 0.99 = 20.08 ?? It is in fact 15.82

Which explains my first question: Where is Firefox 3.6? I cannot believe ie6 is still "so big" and Firefox 3.6 has vanished. Which it hasn't. It clearly has ~ 4.26% or a bit less.

Kinda misleading info graphic

While it's a different data set, StatCounter's numbers show Firefox 3.6 accounting for 0.86% of page views last month: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combine...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Firefox_usage_share has a further breakdown of the Firefox numbers from StatCounter for September.

"Firefox 3.6 has vanished. Which it hasn't. It clearly has ~ 4.26% or a bit less."

It clearly doesn't. Firefox 1 to Firefox 11 have a combined 4.26 percent market share.

Am I missing something? Safari is the big winner according the article with a gain of 0.16%, but IE6 gained 0.3%. Am I reading this wrong? Surely IE6 would be the big winner in this (flawed, as reading above comments suggests) study.

Analytics for a site I run (mainly dealing with web-dev) has Chrome usage growing at a steady rate. For the past 6 months, Chrome has gained about 1% market share a month (out of ~160,000 visits a month).

These pie charts are bad. You shouldn't have the same browser switch colors as you go through the charts. IE starts as purple then is blue; Firefox makes it from blue to purple to red.

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