[judofyr]

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

[harshreality]

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?

[dbaupp]

> 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.

[kalleboo]

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

[Tobu]

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

[powertower]

> 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.

[powertower]

> 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.

[saturdaysaint]

So Chrome is the most used browser and IE is the browser used by the most people. Which is the more profitable status?

[azakai]

> So Chrome is the most used browser and IE is the browser used by the most people. Which is the more profitable status?

It depends.

Are you selling ads by pagehits? Then the former. Are you selling user info by number of users? Then the latter.

(And aside from ads and personal info, browsers don't make money in a direct way.)

[mdwrigh2]

> (And aside from ads and personal info, browsers don't make money in a direct way.)

Not entirely true. The Chrome Webstore makes some money, though admittedly not much.

[simonbrown]

Source?

[bnegreve]

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

[mindstab]

Ha, and just like in Stats counter's daily stats http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20120531-2012062... You can see that on weekends IE drops off to everyone else's gain. People are still being force to use IE at work, but their choice in many cases is something. Interesting to see.

[zanny]

It says that IE makes up 25% of cellular browsers. I have to seriously doubt that.

1. I don't know anyone who owns any Windows Phone up through Phone 7. 2. I don't know anyone who knows how to use a 3g / 4g hotspot who would be dumb enough to still use IE.

[alttab]

Frankly your anecdote simply proves you don't know anyone dumb enough to still use IE.

[blibble]

it's interesting to see that that people use IE at work, and Chrome at home (see the 2 day distortions every 5 days)!

[powertower]

I see the dip, but IE usage "at home" is still more than 2x that of Chrome (44% vs 20%).

[mjs]

From the FAQ http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_faq.html: the data comes from a sample of 600 million requests (out of two trillion (?)) to mostly US sites who are Akamai customers.

[SiVal]

When you compare the Akamai stats to Statcounter's "North America" stats, the resemblance is a lot closer. It's possible that Akamai's traffic has a heavy North American weighting.