Most used web browser by country as of February 2013 according to
StatCounter.
The usage share of web browsers is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of websites that use a particular web browser. For example, when it is said that Chrome has 37% usage share, it means that some version of Google Chrome is used by 37% of visitors that visit a given set of sites. Web browser usage share varies from region to region as well as through time.
Accuracy
Measuring browser usage in the number of requests (page hits) made by each user agent can be misleading.
Overestimation
Not all requests are generated by a user, as a user agent can make requests at regular time intervals without user input. In this case, the user's activity might be overestimated. Some examples:
- Certain anti-virus products fake their user-agent to appear to be popular browsers. This is done to trick attack sites that might display clean content to the scanner, but not to the browser. The Register reported in June 2008 that traffic from AVG Linkscanner, using an IE6 user-agent, outstripped human link clicks by nearly 10 to 1.[2]
- A user who revisits a site shortly after changing or upgrading browsers may be double-counted under some methods; overall numbers at the time of a new version's release may be skewed.[3]
- Occasionally websites are written in such a way that they effectively block certain browsers. One common reason for this is that the website has been tested to work with only a limited number of browsers, and so the site owners enforce that only tested browsers are allowed to view the content, while all other browsers are sent a 'failure' message, and instruction to use another browser.[4] Many of the untested browsers may still be otherwise capable of serving the content. Sophisticated users who are aware of this may then 'spoof' the user-agent in order to gain access to the site.
- The browsers Chrome, Safari and Opera will under some circumstances fetch resources before they need to render them, so that the resources can be used faster if they are needed. This technique, prerendering or pre-loading, may inflate the statistics for the browsers using it due to pre-loading of resources which are not used in the end.[5]
Underestimation
It is also possible to underestimate the usage share by using the number of requests, for example:
- Opera and Gecko-based browsers since Firefox 1.5 use fast Document Object Model (DOM) caching. JavaScript is only executed on pageload from net or disk cache, but not if it is loaded from DOM cache. This can have an impact on JavaScript-based tracking of browser statistics.[6]
- While most browsers generate additional page hits by refreshing web pages when the user navigates back through page history, some browsers (such as Opera) reuse cached content without resending requests to the server.[7][8]
- Generally, the more faithfully a browser implements HTTP's cache specifications, the more it will be under-reported relative to browsers that implement those specifications poorly.[8]
- Some ISPs, mainly mobile network operators, have begun stripping the user agent strings.[9]
- Browser users may run site, cookie and JavaScript blockers which cause those users to be under-counted. For example, common AdBlock blocklists such as EasyBlock include sites such as StatCounter in their privacy lists, and NoScript blocks all JavaScript by default. addons.mozilla.org reports 15.0 million users of AdBlock variants and 2.2 million users of NoScript.
Differences in measurement
Net Applications and W3Counter use unique visitors to measure web usage.[10] This has the effect that users visiting a site ten times will only be counted once by these sources, while they are counted ten times by statistics companies that measure page hits.
Net Applications also uses country-level weighting to correct for bias caused by variation in sampling rates across countries.[11]
Summary table
The following tables summarize the usage share of browsers for the indicated month.
Historical usage share
StatCounter (July 2008 to present)
StatCounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using StatCounter totaling more than 15 billion hits per month.[12] No weightings are used.
Desktop and mobile browser usage
StatCounter reports desktop (including laptop) and mobile browser share separately. For consistency, each desktop browser share has been reduced by multiplying it by the current overall desktop share versus mobile. Similarly, mobile browser shares have each been multiplied by the overall mobile percentage. This avoids having greater than 100% usage share when combining mobile and desktop.
- ^ StatCounter reports desktop and mobile browser share separately, we report them together. For consistency, each desktop browser share has been reduced by multiplying it by the current overall desktop share versus mobile. Similarly, mobile browser shares have each been multiplied by the overall mobile percentage.
Clicky (Late September 2009 to present)
W3Counter (May 2007 to present)
This site counts the last 15,000 page views from each of approximately 50,000 websites. This limits the influence of sites with more than 15,000 monthly visitors on the usage statistics. W3Counter is not affiliated with the W3C.
Net Applications (2004 Q4 to present)
Net Applications bases its usage share on statistics from 40,000 websites having around 160 million unique visitors per month. The mean site has 1300 unique visitors per day.
On 1 August 2009, Net Applications began weighting its raw data based on the number of internet users in the countries concerned, using data from the CIA the changes were applied retroactively to older data.[13] The table below uses weighted data from 2007 Q4 onwards, and this is reflected in the summary table above.
Wikimedia (April 2009 to October 2012)
Wikimedia traffic analysis reports are based on server logs of about 4 billion page requests per month, based on the user agent information that accompanied the requests.[14] These server logs cover requests to all the Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiversity and others.[15]
How the columns are calculated (October example numbers):
- For IE: non mobile and tablet are added together: 22.30% + 0.85%
- For Safari mobile: Tablet + "other mobile": 2.62% + 6.00%
- Similarly for Android: Tablet + other mobile: 0.21% + 3.78%
- For mobile total: Tablet and "other mobile" are added together: 3.73% + 11.70%
Older reports
StatOwl.com (September 2008 to November 2012)
92% of sites monitored by StatOwl serve predominantly United States market.[16]
AT Internet Institute (Europe, 2007-07 to 2010–06)
AT Internet Institute was formerly known as XiTi.
Method: Only counts visits to local sites in 23 European countries and then averages the percentages for those 23 European countries independent of population size.
TheCounter.com (2000 to 2009)
TheCounter.com identifies sixteen versions of six browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape, and Konqueror). Other browsers are categorised as either ‘Netscape compatible’ (including Google Chrome, which may also be categorized as 'Safari' due to its 'Webkit' subtag) or ‘unknown’. Internet Explorer 8 is identified as Internet Explorer 7. Monthly data includes all hits from 2008-02-01 until the end of the month concerned. More than the exact browser type, this data identifies the underlying web rendering engine used by various browsers, and the table below aggregates them in the same column.
OneStat.com (2002–04 to 2009–03)
ADTECH (Europe, 2004 to 2009-Q4)
WebSideStory (USA, 1999-02 to 2006–06)
Reports from before year 2000
GVU WWW user survey (1994-01 to 1998–10)
EWS Web Server at UIUC (1996 Q2 to 1998)
ZD Market Intelligence (USA, 1997-01 to 1998–01)
Zona Research (USA, 1997-01 to 1998–07)
AdKnowledge (1998-01 to 1998–06)
Dataquest (1995 to 1997)
International Data Corporation (US, 1996 to 1997)
See also
References
- ^ Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Browsers, 2013-2, Wikimedia, http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/sq uid_reports/2013-02/SquidReportClient s.htm
- ^ Metz, Cade (26 June 2008). "AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6". The Register. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
- ^ Keizer, Gregg (23 June 2008). "Firefox 3.0 boosts Mozilla's market share". Computerworld. IDG. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
- ^ A better option for the webmaster is to validate the HTML code against prevailing standards [1].
- ^ "Frequently Asked Questions". StatCounter.
- ^ Cacycle (7 June 2010). "Using Firefox 1.5 caching". Mozilla. Retrieved 3 February 2010.
- ^ Pettersen, Yngve Nysæter (27 February 2007). "Introducing Cache Contexts, or: Why the browser does not know you are logged out". My Opera. Opera Software. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
- ^ a b Sharovatov, Vitaly (3 June 2008). "HTTP History Lists and Back Button". WordPress. Retrieved 3 February 2010.
- ^ Butcher, Mike (21 September 2007). "Vodafone in mobile web storm". TechCrunch Europe. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
- ^ "Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines | News". Netmarketshare.com. Retrieved 2012-12-30.
- ^ "Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines | News". Marketshare.hitslink.com. Retrieved 2012-12-30.
- ^ "Statcounter statistics methodoly". StatCounter. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
- ^ "Country Level Weighting". Net Applications. 1 August 2009. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
- ^ Zachte, Erik (15 February 2011). "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Browsers e.a.". Retrieved 4 March 2011.
- ^ Zachte, Erik (15 February 2011). "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Requests by destination". Retrieved 4 March 2011.
- ^ "About Our Data". Statowl.com. Retrieved 12 January 2011.
External links
- W3Schools' Browser Statistics lists the web stats only from the W3 Schools site, which gives the approximate usage share of browsers among "people with an interest for web technologies."
|
---|
| | | Features | |
---|
| Web standards | |
---|
| Related topics | |
---|
| | | | | | | | - Software no longer in development shown in italics
- Category
- Commons
|
|