14 DAY TRIAL // No, Internet Explorer did not lose 10% market share in just a few days. Since the start of October reports have placed IE at either just under 60% (Net Applications) of the browser market, or lower than 50% (StatCounter). They both can’t be right, can they? Well, fact is that no, and the difference can be easily explained by the methodologies applied by the two Internet metrics firms.
“The company's research arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google's Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year,” StatCounter noted yesterday.
Earlier this month, Net Applications published its own statistics, revealing that IE was at 59.65%, with Firefox following with 22.96% and Chrome at 7.98%.
“IE8 continued its growth this month, making our browser usage share growth 0.57% for our current offerings (IE8 and IE9) in September,” said Ryan Gavin, Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing.
“We are pleased to report that customers are choosing more modern browsers, as evident by the continued decline of IE6 and IE7 usage (drops of 0.63% and 0.50% respectively in September according to Net Applications). This is goodness for the industry as a whole.”
Judging strictly by the information share by both Net Applications and StatCounter regarding their methodologies when it comes down to measuring the browser marker, I would say that the first offers a more accurate perspective over browser wars than the latter.
There are a few points that need to be touched, the first related to data sampling. Users are bound to agree that the manner in which information is harvested will impact the statistics provided to the public.
As far as the Data Sample base is concerned, StatCounter is basing all its reports on page views rather than on unique users.
This means that a single visitor will get counted over and over again, as long as there are visits to the same monitored websites.
NetMarketshare has a different approach, and is looking at the number of unique visitors rather than that of visits. In this regard, Net Applications counts only a single visit from a specific user a single time per day.
Another aspect in which the two company’s modus operandi differs is related to Geographic Weighting.
StatCounter does involve a global sample, but fact is that they do not take into consideration the actual size of the markets they monitor.
According to them, their top ten countries used for sampling are 4.0 billion United States; 1.2 billion Brazil; 782 million United Kingdom; 633 million Germany; 625 million Thailand; 539 million Turkey; 477 million Canada; 451 million Indonesia; 426 million India and 395 million China.
NetApplications again has a different approach, and does take into consideration geo-base weighting.
Essentially, for specific markets, NetApps looks at country level data, based on the population, rather than just taking into accounts each visit.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Build 9.0.7930.16406 is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 for Windows is available for download here.