3 ms·

"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 a

by dewitt 13y ago

"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?

arrrg 13y ago
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.
Encosia 13y ago
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%.
- stephenhuey 13y ago
  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.
bzbarsky 13y ago
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 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.
JohnTHaller 13y ago
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.

by dewitt 13y ago

arrrg 13y ago

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.

Encosia 13y ago

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%.

stephenhuey 13y ago
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.

bzbarsky 13y ago

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 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.

JohnTHaller 13y ago

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.