

Peak Chrome? Google's browser falls as Firefox, Internet Explorer stay flat - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/peak-chrome-googles-browser-falls-as-firefox-internet-explorer-stay-flat/

======
rodion_89
These number are _very_ different than that shown by StatCounter [1] and
Wikipedia [2]. If you look at Wikipedia's comparisons, they compare data from
many sources. NetApplications (the dataset used by this article) is by far the
one source that differs greatly from the rest of the data.

This likely has to do with the types of audiences that visit the sites they
monitor, so the data should be taken with a grain of salt.

[1] <http://gs.statcounter.com/> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers>

~~~
eckyptang
Indeed. As a point to back this up, 97% of our 80,000,000 daily hits are
internet explorer 7-10.

This confirms is that browser statistics are rubbish!

~~~
ygra
This mostly confirms that browser statistics vary by region, audience, sites
sampled, etc.

That being said, I'd guess if we sampled Facebook and Google (+ regionally
strong competitors, e.g. Baidu) we could get a quite accurate sample of the
general web population ;-)

~~~
huskyr
Why not Wikipedia? It seems to me to be the best source of data, in terms of
'a general site everybody visits'.

~~~
noselasd
I'm wondering what the demographics of wikipedia is though - I'd not be
surprised if it's biased towards students and tech people. I know for sure the
rest of my family does in no way visit wikipedia as much as me and my co-
workers.

~~~
ygra
That's the reason why I left it out of that list. I initially was going to
mention it :-)

------
m_for_monkey
_"Chrome has dropped 0.27 points"_

Is this a joke? That graph looks like four straight (xkcd-style) horizontal
lines.

~~~
dbaupp
Why would you expect to be able to see a deviation of 0.27 on a graph that
goes from 0 to 60? That is a change less than 0.5%.

The numbers quoted aren't read from the graphs, but rather the graphs and the
numbers are derived from a table of data.

------
thauck
Two things:

1\. I wish the author would define "market share" - is it % of users, percent
of pageviews via that browser, or something else.

2\. The adoption visualization really shows the difference between release
strategies.

~~~
deadhead
The article was using the data from NetApplications which is % of users. Most
% of page views, such as StatCounter, still show Chrome as the top browser.

~~~
btilly
Given the mechanics of Chrome prefetching, % of page views figures are
somewhat suspect. (Yes, they try to correct for that, but are the corrections
correct?)

~~~
ksec
Wouldn't prefetching actually bumps up the page view?

~~~
btilly
Yes. And when you artificially bump Chrome's page views, Chrome looks better.

------
hugh4life
Chrome is still moving up on Clicky...

<http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/>

I switched from Firefox to Chrome out of frustration because Firefox kept
breaking the tree-style-tabs extension. I used to be a big Firefox defender
before that but I gave up and moved to Chrome.

------
grandalf
One thing I've noticed over the past year is that Chrome's automatic updates
break functionality (OSX) and then Chrome needs to be restarted, but doesn't
realize this and prompt the user to restart. Now whenever Chrome malfunctions
I check for updates and 90% of the time an update was installed and is waiting
for a restart.

------
batgaijin
Yay, lets go back to pretending Alexa and it's derivatives are actually
relevant to reality!

------
willpearse
Some confidence intervals on these graphs would really make this a lot more
useful...

------
jimgardener
Nice plots..what software did you use to make the plots?

~~~
GrumpySimon
The line graphs are ggplot2 in R (<http://ggplot2.org/>)

------
klrr
How can we know the numbers are correct?

