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Comment by rodion_89 | Hacker News Reader

These number are very different than that shown by StatCounter [1] and Wikipedia [2]. If you look at Wikipedia's comparisons, they compare data from many sources. NetApplications (the dataset used by this article) is by far the one source that differs greatly from the rest of the data.

This likely has to do with the types of audiences that visit the sites they monitor, so the data should be taken with a grain of salt.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

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We at NetApplications understand that our numbers are different from others who report market share. We are the only provider (as far as we know) that does weighting by country. No one has a data source that will truly represent the world accurately (percentage of traffic coming from a geographic region that is the same as the internet usage from that region), so it's an extremely important factor to appropriately report market share by continent or globally. A simple example is that China, by far, has the world's largest population and the world's largest base of internet users. While we have a vast amount of data coming in from China, we still have to factor it to more accurately represent actual internet usage. For more information about this, please read: http://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Methodology

Indeed. As a point to back this up, 97% of our 80,000,000 daily hits are internet explorer 7-10.

This confirms is that browser statistics are rubbish!

This mostly confirms that browser statistics vary by region, audience, sites sampled, etc.

That being said, I'd guess if we sampled Facebook and Google (+ regionally strong competitors, e.g. Baidu) we could get a quite accurate sample of the general web population ;-)

Why not Wikipedia? It seems to me to be the best source of data, in terms of 'a general site everybody visits'.

I'm wondering what the demographics of wikipedia is though - I'd not be surprised if it's biased towards students and tech people. I know for sure the rest of my family does in no way visit wikipedia as much as me and my co-workers.

That's the reason why I left it out of that list. I initially was going to mention it :-)

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