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by ysavir 1834 days ago
How reliable is the 3% rating?

Looking at the sources used on the wikipedia page[0], it seems pretty skeptical. For one, the services for collecting the data seem to be depending on tracking APIs from partnered sites. Does Firefox typically allow those through? Is it reasonable to question whether that's a reliable methodology when one of the values of the browsers is preventing such tracking in the first place?

And it shows NetMarketShare data being as current as of May 2021, despite NetMarketShare not providing data beyond Oct 2020[1]. And the last dataset of NetMarketShare has Firefox at 7%. Publicly, at least. Looking around the site it seems people may have access to the internal API, but questions about data integrity remain (now in conjunction on whether unverifiable data from an API should be used on Wikipedia).

Is there something more I and others should know about these data collectors?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su... [1]https://netmarketshare.com/ "...we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form. October, 2020 is the last month of data."
1 comments
dfabulich 1834 days ago
I got the 3% number from https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

As you noticed, https://netmarketshare.com/ is not a great site for browser share data. For one thing, as you point out, they stopped providing new data points in Oct 2020.

But also, for some reason, NMS automatically filters the view by "desktop/laptop."

If you click the yellow "Delete" button on the right-hand side, it'll show you all browsing data as of Oct 2020. https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%7D...

As of Oct 2020, NMS says that Firefox's overall percentage was 3.32%, and that Edge overtook it over the course of the previous year.

GlobalStats StatsCounter says that as of May 2021, Firefox has 3.36% share, down from 4.38% the prior year. Focusing on desktop browsing, Firefox had 8.91% share last year, and has 7.36% share today.

If Firefox loses another 1.5 points of desktop market share this year (and I see no reason why they wouldn't), they'll dip below 5% desktop share; and well below 3% share when you add in mobile.

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