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Chrome now the most popular browser

gs.statcounter.com

21–30 of 105 posts

Re: Chrome now the most popular browser

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Akamai is probably trying to identify unique sessions or clients, and showing stats based on that. Statcounter is tracking browser usage roughly by percentage of requests. They do some corrections, for instance they try to account for Chrome's prefetching. More people (or more computers) might use IE as their default browser, but if Chrome is responsible for more activity (requests), what's the more popular browser?

> Chrome is responsible for more activity (requests) Does anyone know if the prefetching/prerendering Chrome does is a significant portion of web traffic? Because that could easily skew request-based analytics.

Statcounter claim to adjust for chrome's prefetching, but they never said how (headers?)

Re: Chrome now the most popular browser

#22

Poking around by individual country the only large one I found where Chrome leads is India. Anyone have sauce on why Chrome is so popular there? Are they big enough to skew the whole world?

I don't know in India, but in Brazil, Google has been running TV ads about Chrome in prime time for a while. Maybe they're doing that there too.

Re: Chrome now the most popular browser

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome is responsible for more activity (requests) Does anyone know if the prefetching/prerendering Chrome does is a significant portion of web traffic? Because that could easily skew request-based analytics.

Statcounter claim to adjust for chrome's prefetching, but they never said how (headers?)

Probably the page visibility API: https://developers.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/pagevisibil...

Headers wouldn't work, because a prefetch often turns into a page view.

Edit: their methodology is public. They use the aforementioned API, and headers for the two other browsers that prerender (Firefox and Safari, who rarely prerender because pages must explicitly configure it). Pages pre-rendered and discarded would add 1.3% to Chrome page views if they weren't discounted. Here is the StatCounter FAQ: http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#prerendering

Re: Chrome now the most popular browser

#24
post #7

Akamai just recently released their statistics, which shows a completely different picture: http://www.akamai.com/io

Akamai is probably trying to identify unique sessions or clients, and showing stats based on that. Statcounter is tracking browser usage roughly by percentage of requests. They do some corrections, for instance they try to account for Chrome's prefetching. More people (or more computers) might use IE as their default browser, but if Chrome is responsible for more activity (requests), what's the more popular browser?

> what's the more popular browser?

In the most general of ways, the browser more people use.

Which in this case, via Akamai stats, is clearly IE.

Re: Chrome now the most popular browser

#27

Poking around by individual country the only large one I found where Chrome leads is India. Anyone have sauce on why Chrome is so popular there? Are they big enough to skew the whole world?

Not sure this is the reason but Google advertised Chrome heavily in India in addition to the Google properties which are themselves very popular in India. They did advertisements in prime spots in TV, newspapers, other popular Indian websites etc. That could've definitely contributed. Also it's nice to see that Firefox is not lagging much behind Chrome in India.

Regarding your question on population, not sure how big is the Indian internet population. I would say 5% of the country(total pop. 1 bn approx) uses Internet regularly. Not sure how much that skews the data.

Re: Chrome now the most popular browser

#28
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome is responsible for more activity (requests) Does anyone know if the prefetching/prerendering Chrome does is a significant portion of web traffic? Because that could easily skew request-based analytics.

Statcounter claim to adjust for chrome's prefetching, but they never said how (headers?)

> Statcounter claim to adjust for chrome's prefetching

It didn't seem to make any non-marginal effect on the graph. I wonder if they can accurately account for the pre-rendering.

Of course, pre-rendering might just be that good, that it's always hitting the right pages.

Re: Chrome now the most popular browser

#30
post #7

Akamai just recently released their statistics, which shows a completely different picture: http://www.akamai.com/io

From your Akamai's website: most of the Web sites sampled for the Akamai IO Beta are focused on a U.S. audience.

The results are comparable if you restrict statcounter's stats to US only

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