Chrome hits 17-month low, Windows 8 still only creeping upward | Hacker News Reader

Chrome hits 17-month low, Windows 8 still only creeping upward

arstechnica.com

22 pointsjor-el22 comments

I've never been able to make sense of Net Market Share's numbers or why they're so wildly divergent from nearly every other source. Just take a look at the big ones listed on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...

The other stats sources consistently align in a pretty narrow range of around 2%-7% for any given browser. But Net Market Share consistently shows Chrome as more than 10% lower, and IE more than 20% above what every other stats provider is seeing. The only thing I can figure is that their sample base is just too narrow to avoid what seems to clearly be a severe systemic bias.

I just started a conversation on Twitter with the author.

https://twitter.com/garyharan/status/307905674279518208

Yeah, weird stats. I checked some other sources:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp … (IE 14%, Chrome 48%)

http://gs.statcounter.com/ (IE 29%, Chrome 37%)

My own website with 10k+ daily visitors has IE 14% and 35% Chrome

Our tech site (servicestack.net) last month stats:

  - Chrome 59%
  - Firefox 18% 
  - IE 8.7%

They weight results against number of internet users in different countries according to CIA, most of others don't weight. Major source of difference is China, just select China on StatCounter and see.

I believe this explains it:

One big difference is that NetMarketShare tries to measure unique clients, while StatCounter measures web page hits.

Since the power users browse (probably a magnitude of order) more web pages than the normal users, Chrome and Firefox is overrepresented in power users who browse a ton.

Toothpaste marketshare analogy. It's possible that 70% of people use Colgate and 30% use Crest, but Colgate sales by volume are only 40% vs. 60% for Crest, since Crest users tend to brush more daily and use more of the toothpaste when they do for some reason.

Or a car analogy: Toyota sells 40% of cars and Honda only 30%, but 60% of miles driven on roads are by Honda cars since they use it more. Which has a higher marketshare?

So from what I gather NetMarketShare measures number of users more closely than does StatCounter. Statcounter OTOH measures how much traffic use there really is.

I believe NetMarketShare data is 'sponsored'.. http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#net-apps

What on that page makes you believe so?

After years of the highest satisfaction with Chrome on Windows, lately I've been experiencing many annoying crashes. This is also true for some people I know.

For myself, it might depend on the fact that I'm using more extensions now, but that isn't true, for example, for my father.

I don't want to imply anything, but this reminds me of when I switched from Netscape Navigator to IE back in the day, not because IE was "better" (AFAIR IE was an exact copy of Navigator, just with a big "e" instead of a big "N" in the upper right corner) but because Navigator was becoming more and more unstable.

I've found Chrome (and all browsers in this day and age, for that matter) to be quite stable, and I haven't heard complaints from others. Before switching browsers (which can be pretty inconvenient) it may be worth debugging if this is an issue with your system in general rather than the browser.

Have you and your father tried the advice on this page? http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

I didn't; thank you for your suggestion, I'll check those suggestions out the next time I'm on Windows.

Periodically clearing the browsing data, AppData and %TEMP folders does the trick for me. In my experience, that's not Chrome specific; all web browsers get bogged down over time. In the same vein, it's good to do a clean install of your OS once a year.

I stopped periodically reinstalling my OS since windows 2k... and wouldn't like to start again :)

That's your pejorative, but to objectively compare the speed and stability of browsers or OSes, you need to use clean installs. Software gets slower over time, because of all the cruft that accumulates.

By 'pejorative', I meant 'prerogative'. Silly auto correct.

I'm not surprised.

I know no one who has upgraded to windows 8. I got 5 free copies with my MSDN sub and one got claimed before I deleted the VM. Considering I work for a Microsoft partner with 180 staff, we have one windows 8 machine and its an RT Surface used by QA. We have 4 VMs for testing as well which never visit the www at all. We have more Macs in the office!

Chrome I find to be slightly obtuse and buggy. Constant tab crashes and hangs and I'm really not sure its that fast. Friends seem to have the same opinion. One complaint I hear is that people are constantly prompted to sign into chrome. We're pretty much all back on Firefox and IE.

Meh.

I'm missing the most important graph: combined mobile & desktop browser market share.

Mobile phones, tablets and PMPs (like the iPod touch) increasingly replace desktop computers and notebooks for browsing the web.

According to Statcounter [1], 14% of all web traffic in the US comes from mobile clients. Compare that to 8% a year a go and 3% three years a go. In Africa [2], mobile already makes up 18% of web clients.

Granted, Statcounter is just one source, but I think it shows the trend quite well.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-US-monthly-2008...

[2] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-af-monthly-2008...

Most interesting is the adoption rate at the bottom. Seems like IE users virtually never upgrade, wtf?! At one point IE6 share even grew, how is that!?

on arstechnica.com.

it's highest everywhere else.

... including microsoft.com?

I'm assuming you mean Chrome has the highest desktop market share overall. That jibes with the browser stats for my own websites. On mobile, Safari reigns supreme. And as more people browse the web on mobile devices, WebKit based browsers continue to grab market share from Internet Explorer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com