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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but that's a weird statement from the WSJ:

"Firefox is the world’s second-most-popular Web browser on personal computers, with 18% market share, according to Net Applications, a web-analytics consulting firm. That trails Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 58% share, and just ahead of Google’s Chrome, with 17% share."

Here's what I found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers:

                Chrome  IE      Firefox Safari
  StatCounter	46.60%	24.64%	20.37%	5.06%
  W3Counter	34.1%	20.3%	18.3%	17.8%
  Wikimedia	42.69%	18.02%	15.28%	6.06%

Of all the places you could pull browser share numbers, I didn't think any were still reporting IE with a usage lead anymore.

And the interesting browser growth today, of course, is all mobile. (So those outgoing board members were right in several ways.)

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Net Applications is. It’s right there in the Wikipedia article you are linking to. Net Applications measure unique visits and do country level weighing of data. The article is also quoting Net Application’s desktop numbers. That might explain the difference, at least partly.

Overall I would argue that the statement in the article, while accurate, can be misleading. It should probably include mobile usage numbers (though the sentence you quoted makes clear that they don’t – and on mobile phones Firefox isn’t much of a player anyway) and maybe note that market share measurement of browsers can be unreliable.

Thanks, I didn't see that on the Wikipedia page.

Still, while I know it's not good to say "data" and "gut feel" in the same sentence, I just have a very hard time believing that IE usage is trending upward while Chrome is trending down. It just doesn't add up.

If we're only talking desktop numbers, I could believe those trends. One could make an argument that at this point in their market maturity, those users who navigate away from IE are a more-or-less static population in terms of proportion of desktop users, so Firefox and Chrome fight for similar users. The growing market share of Windows 8, sluggish or not, could explain an upward trend for IE.

Total suppositions with no data. Not an argument, just thinking aloud.

One other way to possibly interpret this is the substitutability going on: maybe Chrome users are switching to Firefox (or hell even Safari); also Win 8 is growing pretty rapidly.

Sidebar: I find IE 11 pretty usable these days -- give it a try if you're open minded. You might be surprised =)

I don't know why but I saw almost in each famous information site ever using only Net Applications to evaluate the market share of browser. Does it have some sort of better precision rate over the others? It seems strange

Net applications is the only major browser market share source that tries to provide _user_ share, not visit share.

Consider three people: one uses browser X and visits Wikipedia twice a day. One uses browser Y and visits three times a day. One uses browser Z and visits once a day. If you count share amongst users, the three shares are equal. If you count share amongst visits to Wikipedia, you get 50% Y, 33% X, 17% Z.

This same problem comes up if you count visits over a variety of sites too. Some biases cancel out (e.g. the sort you'd get if you measured just Huffington Post vs just Fox News), but biases that have to do with some people just browsing _more_ than others in an absolute sense are not.

Of course both numbers, visits and users, are useful information. They just mean different things.

Net Applications are famous specifically for their incredibly wrong stats.

Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above.

"Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above."

This strikes me as curious, as I don't know of any popular websites who would agree with that statement, since their own traffic more closely matches that of the wikipedia numbers.

Can you explain why you'd make that claim?

So, I really can’t speak to their accuracy, but apparently their network of tracked webpages is quite big, they are measuring unique visitors (not page loads) and they are doing country level weighing of the data.

Whether that makes them more accurate? I really don’t know. But I could very well imagine that for those tracking firms their sample is heavily US and Europe biased (where different browsers as in the rest of the world might dominate), so doing some weighing may increase their accuracy. Or not. I really don’t know.

Some light googling does reveal that this is a highly contentious topic with people from all sides screaming at each other about questions of methodology. Do with that info what you will.

Well, just one data point, but I have a consumer-facing site that sees a few hundred thousand visitors a month with only 6.1% of those coming from Firefox in the last month.

On the flip side, Chrome usage dominates among visitors on my development-focused blog at 61.7% and IE trails Firefox (22.2%) at 9.5%.

And our consumer-facing site has 46% IE users due to the healthcare world hanging onto that browser. Chrome has 23% and Safari and Firefox are neck and neck in the teens.

The sites are measuring visits. That's what StatCounter measures too.

On the other hand, Net Applications attempts to measure _users_. This is a very different number from visits; it turns out that Chrome users visit more web pages on average than IE users (in addition to a variety of other demographic differences between the two groups), with Firefox users somewhere in the middle. See my example at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490952 for a simple rundown of how the numbers can be very different depending on what you're measuring, even if we assume perfect measurement.

Most of the large general sites I know of that break it out by visitors (not by hits, which is silly) fall in line with the Net Applications numbers. Note that these numbers will not match up with tech-focused sites or most startup and early-adopter sites (most of the sites folks that visit HN run). So, you'll get voted down any time you state it here (see my post above downvoted to 0), because, for some reason, people get really mad any time you point out how dominant IE still is.

And I say this as someone with my own large tech-focused site (over 2m visitors a month) which sees about a 40-34-17-3 split for Chrome-Firefox-IE-Opera.

There's been some progress, though, as at least we have fewer clueless people citing W3Schools' stats these days.

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