I’ve written about StatCounter’s data that suggests that Chrome is now the number one browser in terms of share. I’ve also written about data from W3Counter and Clicky indicating that Chrome isn’t the number one browser yet, but should be in a matter of weeks or months at most.
What I haven’t written about until now is the site tracking web browser share whose data doesn’t agree with StatCounter, W3Counter and Clicky: Net Applications’ NetMarketShare. Here’s their desktop browser share trends graph, which says that IE’s market share is greater than 50% and, believe it or not, climbing slightly:
Click the graph to see the live version on NetMarketShare’s site.
According to an article in the IE Blog published in March (in response to reports of Chrome’s gaining on IE), NetMarketShare’s methods of measuring browser share differs from StatCounter’s, and presumably W3Counter’s and Clicky’s. Their methods, which involve not counting Chrome’s pre-rendered pages and using geoweighting, put IE at the top of the heap by a great margin, so naturally their stats are the ones that Microsoft highlights.
In case you saw the “.aspx” extension of NetMarketShare’s site and automatically wrote them off as practitioners of what I like to call “Microsophistry”, keep in mind that their stats paint a pretty sad picture for Microsoft’s mobile browser share. There, mobile IE is too small a player to be named:
Click the graph to see the live version on NetMarketShare’s site.
4 replies on “NetMarketShare Says IE Still Has a Comfy Lead”
[…] an article showing browser usage share stats by W3Counter and Clicky. I’ve also written an article about NetMarketShare’s stats, which say that IE has a very comfortable lead and is … You might also find this comic […]
Hi!
There are a number of differences between our service (StatCounter Global Stats) and Net Apps which may account for the differing numbers:
http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#net-apps
I checked out that link in teh comment and its pretty illuminating.
>>>StatCounter Global Stats are based on a pool of 3 million+ global
websites. Net Apps state that their stats are currently based on over
40,000 websites. (“We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of … over 40,000 websites”<<<
I noticed that netmarketshare didn’t even include Dolphin browser in the stats for mobile browsers. It’s as if it didn’t even exist. That tells me their methodology and numbers are junk. When you miss a data point that big, you are obviously jiggering the numbers in some way to do something for a reason. I say that because I am giving them credit for being intelligent. Otherwise to miss the number one third party browser in the Android universe means they’re idiots. In either case it means their numbers aren’t worth a steaming pile of …