Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

How does Net Apps measure browser market share that they get such huge difference for IE, which they put at 54%, compared to StatCounter who puts it at around 30%? To me the StatCounter numbers seem more accurate.

View on HN

I always forget what the difference is, so I always go back to this same wikipedia page to remind me of the differences:

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

You can click around on each source, and they have an explanation of how each source get their numbers and adjust them. It's very insightful to understand the differences in measurement. For example:

> StatCounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using StatCounter totaling more than 15 billion hits per month.[17] No weightings are used.

> Net Applications bases its usage share on statistics from 40,000 websites having around 160 million unique visitors per month. The mean site has 1300 unique visitors per day. On 1 August 2009, Net Applications began weighting its raw data based on the number of internet users in the countries concerned, using data from the CIA ; the changes were applied retroactively to older data.

> How does Net Apps measure browser market share that they get such huge difference for IE, which they put at 54%, compared to StatCounter who puts it at around 30%? To me the StatCounter numbers seem more accurate.

Apples and oranges. Net Applications measures users, while StatCounter measures usage. It is entirely possible both are right, and the different numbers are both accurate about what they measure.

It is also possible one or both is wrong, possibly by a large amount - we don't have any good data against which to validate them (that data exists, but it isn't public - Google and Facebook know the truth).

The numbers that matter are your websites' numbers and no others.

I had to make a website for a brand with strong sales in China. The client asked for a full IE6 support "because chinese use IE6 according to X and Y." IE6 support is expensive.

I was quite doubtful, the brand is a luxury one, kinda confidential, so the user had to belong to the new rich class which can afford a real computer. But they did not have any data and did not want me to gather data on their actual website to confirm or infirm my hypothesis.

The IE6 friendly website lauched. The stats reports less than 4% IE7 and less usage (including funny browser derived from IE.)

Net Apps seems to be doing it the other way around for mobile browsers, though. Because iOS always comes out with something like 60% market share, and Android with 20%, even though there are more Android devices than iOS devices now, but the iPad browser usage is much higher than the browser usage of any phone, and Android doesn't have that many tablets in the market yet.

"To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than of page views. Nevertheless, for December 2012, StatCounter listed Chrome as first with 36.53 percent share, IE in second with 30.88 percent, Firefox in third with 21.93 percent, Safari with 7.89 percent, and Opera with 1.26 percent."

The StatCounter measure seems more accurate to me too, if only because their numbers are more in line with Wikimedia's numbers. And I mean, who doesn't use Wikipedia? I imagine few people are in a better position to measure browser usage than they are, possibly not even google (though possibly with their ad network?)

(For anyone interested, statcounter's stats are here: http://gs.statcounter.com/)

"IE6 somehow managed to gain 0.06 percentage points", which may indicate the NetApps data isn't very reliable. (maybe?)

Depends on the margin of error. If it's outside the margin of error it would indeed raise some eyebrows.

There will always be some testing of IE6 by developers on clean WinXP VMs. As testing becomes easier and easier (see apps like browserling.com) there may be increased usage of older browsers.

This is because you can't measure it accurately. It's akin to religious interpretation. Unfortunately there is plenty of room to divide people and draw up conversations for the analysts to sell.

Browser market share is so incredibly off. I know of 50000 IE7 users who don't even put their browser near the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com