Cooking the books is hard and doesn’t help anyone
General By Dave Ward. Posted March 21, 2012The IE team published an in-depth post over the weekend, raising a few concerns about StatCounter’s methodology (or lack thereof) for reporting browser market share. Their points were interesting to consider, but one of them stood out to me:
You’ll notice some pretty big differences in the weighting of StatCounter versus Net Applications. First and foremost, the most populous country in the world, China, doesn’t make the top 20 for StatCounter, when in fact it represents the world’s largest internet population.
[...]
To further explore this problem, we re-ran the StatCounter numbers and weighted their publicly reported individual country browser share numbers by the CIA internet population data. This calculation would then represent a true country or geo-weighted view of worldwide browser data based on the actual world’s internet population.
It’s true that we should be wary of methodology issues that can creep into data extracted from analytics services that weren’t designed with aggregate statistics in mind. StatCounter’s data is often accepted at face value, without any detailed scrutiny. However, I believe this geo-weighting approach they’ve explored may be as flawed as the raw, unadjusted data itself.
Why does it matter?
What’s the use in splitting hairs about this? When I finished writing this post, I wondered the same thing. Why did I bother writing 1,000+ words about a random IE marketing post?
Microsoft is an incredibly metrics-driven company. You can be sure that these numbers are intended to make a case for ignoring certain aspects of Chrome and Firefox, prioritizing particular Internet Explorer features, and/or confirming that Internet Explorer is turning the tide against Chrome and Firefox.
As long as Internet Explorer is the baseline browser that ships with every Windows-based PC, massaging the numbers to downplay the popularity of what Chrome and Firefox are doing hurts us all. So, that’s why I’m taking the time to voice my doubts about this recent post.
What’s an “Internet user” anyway?
The motivation behind this geo-weighting approach seems to be that the CIA World Factbook reports China’s “Internet users” at a robust 389 million, compared to the US’ 245 million, whereas StatCounter only reports about one percent of the traffic it tracks as coming from IE-laden China. So, maybe it’s reasonable to argue that StatCounter’s numbers for IE usage should be adjusted proportionally.
Not so fast though. If you’re like me, you might be curious what actually counts as an “Internet user” first. Here’s the CIA World Factbook’s definition:
The number of users within a country that access the Internet. Statistics vary from country to country and may include users who access the Internet at least several times a week to those who access it only once within a period of several months.
Reasonable interpretations of that include counting every person that uses an Internet cafe a few times a year and everyone who checks email from an app on their phone as Internet users. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like an incredibly vague statistic to warrant such a significant adjustment.
It gets worse though. Keep that definition in mind for a minute and let’s talk about another statistic that varies greatly between China and the US.
You can’t ignore mobile
The most current CIA World Factbook stats on mobile phone usage put China at a whopping 859 million subscribers versus 279 million in the US. While Internet access via mobile phone was insignificant in the pre-iPhone US, it has long been the norm in many Eastern countries (some research points to a full two-thirds of Chinese Internet access being via mobile phone).
Given that reliance on mobile access and the nearly 600 million mobile subscribers China has on the US, it’s reasonable to assume that a non-trivial chunk of the “Internet user” gap between the US and China is comprised of mobile users. In fact, the data suggests to me that China’s higher number of total Internet users may actually represent less access via traditional PC than in the US.
Speaking of those mobile users, while we’re swimming in a sea of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices in the US, it’s easy to forget that the venerable Nokia feature phone is still the dominant Internet-enabled mobile device in many countries (China included). Behind Nokia, manufacturers like Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson also sell a combined tens-of-millions of feature phones with Internet capabilities in markets like China each year.
More importantly, only a tiny fraction of mobile phones run any version of Internet Explorer, and no feature phone that I’m aware of runs Internet Explorer. When you consider this aspect of the CIA’s data, it seems plausible that IE’s market share in Eastern countries may actually need to be adjusted downward if anything.
Why not version-weighting too?
The IE team’s blog post specifically mentioning China reminded me of The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown site that Microsoft itself launched last year. One of the datapoints that really stands out there is that China represents a solid majority of Internet Explorer 6’s remaining user base (largely due to pirated copies of Windows XP that can’t easily be upgraded to IE7+):
So, even if you believe that China’s browser share numbers should be adjusted upward to compensate for the potential discrepancy in StatCounter’s data, nearly a full quarter of those users are still stuck on IE6. That’s hardly something to be proud of in 2012, but even more embarrassing in a discussion about IE’s market share as compared to Chrome and Firefox’s rapidly upgrading user base.
Why so mean?
My aim here isn’t to pointlessly bash the Internet Explorer team.
They really are doing some great work on turning IE around. I think IE9 was an inflection point where the Windows team got serious about the web again, and IE10 is poised to bring Internet Explorer forward to a place where it can focus more on moving the entire web platform forward like it did in its heyday 10+ years ago.
Yet, no one benefits from this sort of accounting trick; not even the IE team itself.
- If they believe that IE9 has similar or higher market share to Chrome, it’s easier to dismiss features like HTML5 Notifications as fringe APIs that can wait till later, when implementing them in IE9 or IE10 would’ve been a win for both developers and users.
- If they believe that IE9 is more popular than it is and that IE10 is likely to follow in those footsteps, they might be more inclined to continue ignoring the de facto standard touch events API that iOS and Android both support and create a proprietary API instead.
- If they believe Chrome (and Firefox, to a lesser extent) has been relatively unsuccessful with a rapid release cycle and forced upgrades, it’s easier to remain confident that Internet Explorer’s slow release and upgrade cycle is still as viable as ever.
Rather, I think if Microsoft wants to truly bring Internet Explorer back to dominance, they need to take stock and reevaluate some of their sacred cows:
- Multiple versions side-by-side: A modern browser may either auto-update on a regular basis or be able to install every one of its currently active versions side-by-side. For example, it’s trivial to test in many versions of Firefox on the same machine and you’ll never need to test in a year-old version of Chrome.
- Support for XP and Vista: This is related to the previous item, but punting on support for older operating systems is directly responsible for the awful fragmentation that Internet Explorer continues to suffer. Why have Chrome and Firefox figured out how to implement WebGL 3D acceleration on Windows XP, but the company that actually created Windows XP can’t get IE9′s 2D acceleration to work on it? Come on.
- Embrace the platform: I actually think some of IE9′s proprietary features are compelling. IE9′s work on 2D acceleration spurred the rest of the browsers to take that feature more seriously and site pinning leapfrogs Chrome’s application shortcuts by a long shot. However, that doesn’t make it okay to ignore de facto standards like the HTML5 Notification API and the touch events API, where other browsers have been playing nice with each other.
What do you think?
If you’re part of the 80% of people who visit my site in Firefox or a WebKit browser, what would it take to make Internet Explorer your default browser? Is it possible?
If you’re part of the 8% of people who visit my site in Internet Explorer, why are you using IE? Corporate policy, or are the rest of us missing out on something?
Similar posts
What do you think?
I appreciate all of your comments, but please try to stay on topic. If you have a question unrelated to this post, I recommend posting on the ASP.NET forums or Stack Overflow instead.
If you're replying to another comment, use the threading feature by clicking "Reply to this comment" before submitting your own.
All I kept thinking was “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
All joking about the misuse of statistics aside, the reason I use Chrome almost exclusively (I say almost because I’m forced to use IE when testing internal web apps due to the fact that it’s our corporate browser) is because:
It’s fast!
It has awesome debugging tools built in
It has a “clean” UI design
Extensions are useful and easily managed
It synchronises my bookmarks across the 2 latops and 1 computer I use
Until IE surpasses Chrome in almost all of the above aspect by a significant margin, I’m not likely to switch from Chrome. After the suffering we’ve had to endure from previous versions of IE, there’s a fair bit of IE-haters (including me) out here. You only have to read Paul Irish’s blog about browser market pollution to know the sort of IE-version pain we’re being subjected to.
I use Chrome and actually want to shift to IE9, mainly as it renders much faster. But I am an avid Gleebox user and since that is not supported in IE I have to stay. So support for plugins like Gleebox is a must for me. :)
I think the IE brand is permanently damaged. I really see no way the IE team can turn the ship around at this point. Chrome has far too much momentum. And now that there are so many more operating systems to choose from in the consumer market the PC and IE browser are going to continue to lose market share. IE is not dead but make no mistake about it… it is dying a slow, painful death.
I switched to Chrome for my daily use about a year ago and never looked back. I only use IE when I need to test my site development and I’ll occasionally drop into the javascript debugger. I would never use it again for day-to-day browsing.
I use IE because it does all I need: fast, light, debugging tools are great.
I feel there is too much hatred lately towards IE. Use what you want. Market will decide what’s the best.
It’s impossible to me to move to IE, just because of the plugins. Now I have a browser+plugins perfectly tailored for me.
Dave,
Do you actually see notifications as a non-fringe API? Outside of Chrome (well I’m assuming webkit) I’m not aware of any other browser which has implemented them. Having read the spec it seems very much like they are trying to address a particular scenario, chromebook. How viable that becomes for the rest of the web community I’m not sure (side note Win8 does have a notification system but I don’t think it’s using the WebNotification API: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows.ui.notifications.toastnotification#Y0).
This pisses me off constantly, and the response I always get from the IE team is not good enough. That said I can some what understand their justification that the touch events don’t suffice for the multi-touch requirements of Windows 8 and that a consolidated API for input via a mouse, pen or touch can be beneficial. What I don’t get is why they aren’t proposing amendments to the touch event API or why the pointer events isn’t proposed either.
And the reason I use Chrome is extensions.
i can think of a few cases where the notification api is useful:
web based email clients giving notifications of new emails
chat app giving notifications of new private messages and/or people signing on or off.
those are just the scenarios ive PERSONALLY used them for. i imagine many more still exist.
also i think FF needs to take up the notifications API and i think chrome needs to take up the menu tag and associated context attribute. (those are REALLY useful)
HTML5 Notifications are useful on any platform, not just Chrome OS. For example, the way Gmail uses them to pop up new mail notifications is nice to have on both Windows and OS X.
You’re right that the API is new, but Chrome is going to solidly overtake Internet Explorer unless something changes (it already has begun to on the weekends). Since every one of those people running Chrome have the notifications API, I wouldn’t call that API fringe at this point.
The reason I pointed that API out specifically is because of the work IE9 did to implement proprietary APIs that are in a similar vein (whereas at least HTML5 Notifications is a draft standard), like its notifications that only add an overlay to the taskbar icon. I would much rather see the IE team put work toward supporting APIs like HTML5 Notifications first, acknowledging that some ~30% of the Internet already has this API while IE9 still has barely more than a third of that reach. If that happened, I think we’d have more sites using notifications than the sum of sites using one or the other currently, and then Firefox would probably follow suit too.
I personally use Firefox since several years and until similar features/extensions like NoScript are not available elsewhere I’ll not going to switch, even if the performance and memory footprint are sub-standard in the meantime.
I don’t have XP, but last time I checked I thought that XP supported IE6, IE7 and IE8 – but not IE9 or later:
IE7 on Win XP
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=2
IE8 on Win XP:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=43
Is there some real evidence that pirated copies of XP don’t support IE7 and IE8?
I’d have thought Chinese firewalls blocking western sites would be far more likely or even a cultural resistance to change or there is even the possibility that they are happy on IE6.
You have not shown any real evidence that Chinese users are ‘stuck’ on IE6 so I reckon your ‘version-weighting’ section is bogus as it is based on a questionable guess.
I’m on Win 7/Chrome 17.0.963.79 m – never use IE but I find the Chrome fanboy snobbery to be a bit distasteful TBH.
You can’t install IE7+ (or Service Pack 2, which it requires) without passing WGA. It’s commonly accepted that WGA coupled with China’s software piracy problem is why so many XP installs there are still stuck on IE6.
Windows Update used to only work for “authentic” copies of Windows, and many users don’t update their software (they’ll do the initial download, and update maybe if they are told there is an update, but unless they know there might not be a reason to update)
I believe Microsoft recently changed that policy (at least for IE)
I primarily use Firefox but really using Chrome isn’t that much different for me. They both have a library of extensions they’re both standards compliant (for the most part). IE really lacks these, for now, anyway. IE9 was a giant leap in the right direction but I think IE10 is when Microsoft will be able to confidently stand side-by-side with the other major browsers.
I will never go back to IE purely because MS already showed their hand on the importance of the web with IE6: when they “won” the browser wars they sat back and stopped innovating for years – because they don’t make any money directly out of the web so they don’t have an incentive to keep pushing. The current push with IE9/10 is more about saving face than anything in line with their business.
That’s why it’ll always be between Firefox and Chrome for me –
1) Google and Mozilla are both too heavily invested in the web to let it stagnate if either ever “wins” the browser wars
2) Both are open source, so even if they did stop work on their browser, the rest of the internet could pick up where they left off.
The internet is too important to me to entrust it to a closed-source browser.
I lost interest in your argument the minute you inferred that the Notification API is an HTML5 standard. IT IS NOT! Your the lier that keeps telling the lies to push the agenda you have and to promote the products you like regardless of how it hurts others. The link to the Notification API you provided above even clearly stats the following:
“There is draft spec but it is not currently in any standard.”
Go to something useful like learning to tell the truth!
Doesn’t the link to a draft spec make it obvious that I wasn’t claiming HTML5 Notifications are a standard yet? Neither are IE9′s icon overlay notifications, which aren’t even a draft spec. It would’ve been nice to see IE support the emerging standard for desktop notifications first.
My “agenda” is that I want all browsers to be better. Even if I don’t ever use Internet Explorer again, I deal with it as (at least currently) a least common denominator that I have to support every day. The better they do, the better features and support I can give my users.
What’s your agenda here?
Ummm… I can’t see anywhere that he claimed that the Notifications API is an HTML5 standard.
Personally I am annoyed at IE not implementing WebGL or even their own Direct3D version of it, as it is hard to sell some of the tech I’ve developed because companies think IE is still so popular
@JLP: All HTML5 is a draft is html5 ready yet?
I think browser stats are important for a variety of reasons:
- It lets vendors know what they are doing right or wrong
- stats make news.. recently I saw an article on how Chrome was the #1 browser for a day. This raises awareness to non-techies and perhaps prompts some of them to find out what the fuss is about.
In general though, specific market share and how it is measured is not what matters most. It is the trends that vendors should be concerned about. As long as a number is measured the same way every time, then trends are accurate and really tell the story.
The browser war is a huge waste of time. A browser only renders a web page. ‘Fast’ means you are shaving fractions of a second, to maybe a whole second. Versus a well-designed web experience shaving minutes or hours off of your daily life.
I could care less what browser I use. A turd with a title bar would be good enough for me and most business-minded users.
Have to stick with Mozilla. When it comes to browsers, Google is no different from Microsoft, they both want to add proprietary features to their browser. And while Google and Microsoft want to “win” the browser wars, Mozilla’s ideal situation is perpetual competition, because they actually care about the web.
Also, Firebug and AdBlockPlus work best in Firefox, and those are necessary to me.
I manage most of the IT decision at my company, we migrated. When Chrome came out, my answer to questions like “Can we install Chrome instead of FF, was a short or long rant, and a certain no. But then FF started it’s fast release cycle ruining and killing some of my favorite addons for extended periods of time, and the performance wasn’t improving(browser start up and load times). By this time Chrome was past it’s infancy, so i downloaded it, and fell for just like i fell for Mozilla years before.
So the answer to your question is:
1. Chrome screws up somehow and IE has better performance and flexibility than FF.
2.IE brings something vastly superior to the table.
At point two it’s worth mentioning that I would still stick to Chrome if IE doesn’t implement an auto update system, because let’s not forget IE6 was a grate browser when it first came out.
Well.
This is somewhat disheartening to admit, but competition in the browser market is not always good.
The only reason to have different browser (for most users), is their interface. Not their internal engine per se. They of course need the speed and innovations that comes with competition, and the world is a better place for it.
But, for users, and developers, given a perfect world (where no one needed to push development, it just happens), users and developers would have had it better off with one common engine, and different interface and plugins as skins.
But alas, it will not happen, because “keeping up with the jones’s” is what drives this world.
What I think? It would be better for Firefox, Chrome and MSIE to focus on shipping a stable, working, and standard browser than support messy bleeding-edge APIs like today’s heavily bloated Firefox builds.
Did I mention Firefox requires a whooping 90mb just to display Google? Without any extensions, by the way.
What about MSIE’s sluggishness while loading the first time? And Chrome’s immense Webkit-based quirks…
The reason that I use Firefox is the add-ins: adblock plus, better privacy and ghostery. Between those 3 I think my chances of getting a virus are almost zero.
The other day I removed a serious virus from a computer that I made for a customer 3 months earlier. This user surfs the web conservatively while I am likely to surf all over. I’ve never had a virus and, as I set up the computer, it was set up like my own. The biggest difference is that he is using Internet Explorer.
It might be a jump to conclude that the 3 add-ins that I use have protected me, but consider that IE doesn’t have anything to compare and Chrome’s add-ins are a joke by comparison. I’ll stick with what I’m using.
You don’t catch a virus just by using MSIE. The site in question has to host (or refer to) the virus in the first place.
The big difference is that you customer doesn’t know internet like you know and click a link open a file wen to hidden action where he could run the app after accept the “black screen confirmation” to run like an admin.
Your customer probably would will get a virus with Forefox and you problably would will not even in IE.
The problem is that the people doesn’t know how to surf web carefully. But we (probably all people reading this) know how to do this in a safe way.
I am using IE9, and I am in webdevelopment for around 5-6 years. I used to like firefox a lot but lately after using IE9 , I use IE9 as my primary browser. One of the main reason is builtin smart screen filter specially when using online transaction. I also uses chrome. But, literally I do not see any difference in performace between IE9 and chrome (even after 1 year after IE9 released). I sometimes do not understand why there is so much hatered against Microsoft and even latest version of IE. It is easy to find web full of biased comparisons. There are bugs both in IE (much more in <= IE7) and WebKit (I was bitten by document.write bug on dynamic loading scripts in webkit a while back).
I am currently doing a blog series on HTML5 and CSS3 in SharePoint 2010. In my blog, I tested against the latest versions of Chrome, FireFox and IE – 8, 9 & 10. IE8 failed. IE9 Performed CSS3 rendereing on par with Firefox and surpassed Chrome. IE 10 left both other browsers in the dust. You can look at the screen shots and decide for yourself. While you’re at it check out the table of HTML5 features that are supported in IE 10.
http://klines.org/sharepoint/sharepoint-2010-using-modernizr-and-polyfills-in-your-sandbox/
…what would it take to make Internet Explorer your default browser? Is it possible?
I switched to Chrome many years ago for the speed and the small form factor (great on netbooks). However, I’m staying with Chrome for the features. Tools like Vimium / Gleebox are now a standard part of my day. Screen grabbers, advanced HTML inspection and a bunch more.
I’ve stayed for bookmark and plug-in sync with my Google account. Hey it works on my Android phone now too!
MS just lost me in so many ways that it literally has to re-double efforts to win me back. Let’s just go through the losses:
– Hotmail: was just terrible for most of 2004-2007, I simply abandoned it for gmail. Which was faster and cleaner at the time. Now, I can’t live without the keyboard shortcuts and the various tools I have plugged in.
– Windows Live blogging: was also pretty painful, I think I lasted a month or two. Again, I jumped over to Blogger around 2006 or so and my life suddenly got easier. That pretty much un-hooked me from MS.
– IE: has just been a complete mess for years. I haven’t used IE as a main browser since I switched to FF in like 2005 (v2.0 or so). Obviously I kept using it for stuff like testing, but that just reinforced the hatred. Eventually Chrome came around and started smoking both FF and IE. By 2008 basically every dev I knew was using Chrome, we were all installing it on our wives’ netbooks.
– Office: I’ve been an avid Office user and buyer for years. I’ve done lots of work with Macros and I appreciate Office’s amazing set of features. Heck, I even love the ribbon! But I still end up using Google Docs for most stuff now. Why? It’s easy. I can share it with my wife, I can co-edit it with my co-workers or I can make a digital sign-up sheet for Church activities. But my last Office purchase was 2007 and I won’t upgrade until I buy a new computer and decide I need the new software. Yes I know MS has an on-line version now, but Google beat them there by years and I’ve already made my commitment.
– Windows Live Sky Drive: 25 GBs in the cloud? Awesome! I have a ton of uses for this. Oh wait, 50Mb file limit? Well, I can still upload my photos… oh wait, no API? you mean I have to drag and drop these things? oh look… Picasa!!!
– Windows Live Mesh: 5GBs of synced data + remote desktop access? Awesome! Yeah, it is awesome. But promised support for non-MS products never materialized. There’s no API and it’s just falling further and further behind DropBox. Don’t get me wrong, I still use this product and I really like the remote desktop stuff, but between DropBox and Bitcasa and Pogoplug, that Live Mesh isn’t really distinct and almost nobody knows about it.
– Windows Home Server: this was awesome… and then it wasn’t. Drive extender disappears, poor support with the cloud backup services, HP failed support… I guess it’s still easier than a Linux fileserver, but that lead seems to be eroding more and more.
– Azure SDS: remember the original one, that one without relational features, but instead more of a key/value or document-oriented one? Yeah, you could call that one kind of NoSQL-like… I guess that NoSQL thing isn’t really a big deal right? let’s just drop it and give people SQL in the clouds… that NoSQL thing is just a fad :(
– Windows CE w/ phone: yeah I had one of these back in 2006. It had a lot of problems. It had no “close all apps button”, it would completely miss calls, calls would ring but be unanswerable, wi-fi support was sketchy. It had some nice features, but 6 years on, I mostly remember the crummy OS problems.
So here’s the big problem, I just don’t trust Microsoft-built technologies very much. Outside of big money makers: Visual Studio, Windows and Office, much of my MS dealings have just fallen apart. MS just falls behind, I end up migrating all of my stuff elsewhere.
So am I going to move to IE10? Why would I? Why would I spend hours migrating all of my plug-ins and bookmarks and computers when I know that Chrome is going to catch up in a few months anyways? Why would I throw MS a bone when they have let me down so many times?
When somebody lets you down a lot it becomes depressing. Even if you like the person, you start committing less time to them to avoid big let-downs.
That’s where IE stands right now. it’s just one of a big many let-downs. And it’s not just IE, it’s a good chunk of the MS product line. At some point I just don’t want to spend time with MS any more.
The only way to overcome this type of drought is with a significant and steady reversal. IE has to be better for a year, it has to maintain a product quality lead for 12 months+. It can just be a leap-frogger, it has to demonstrate absolute superiority against multiple competitive onslaughts. It has to prove me wrong.
I’m not hopeful.
Hi on few points I would like to reply to:
1) For skydrive :
On February 20, 2012, Microsoft announced that Windows 8 will be able to connect to and store files on SkyDrive. The announcement says that users will be able to connect their computers to SkyDrive accounts to increase their capacity. SkyDrive will also support files as big as 2 GB.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyDrive
2) Hotmail :
Best web app of 2011 by PC Magazine
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2011/12/02/hotmail-named-best-web-app-of-2011-by-pc-magazine.aspx
3) IE10 is the most javascript standard compliant browser
4) Office : Online apps plays seemless with full fledged office.
They are not what they were in 2006 or 2007 for that matter. They have wonderful tools just users have their personal preferences.
I have been used IE9 since it launch. I never need to change to another browser to access some sites becouse IE have compatibility with all. Even with sites made to IE6 I still can use with IE9.
Some bank sites doesn’t accept browsers other than IE. Focus on compatibility again.
I like very much the site pinning. Be notified by news on Hotmail or Facebook without stay with the page in front of the eyes.
Javascript is very fast too. Even with the Webkit Sunspider benchmark IE9 win the others.
About the lack or sync I personally never feel because I use Windows Live Mesh to sync files, Office stuffs and IE favorites.
I already tried Firefox for a while and Chrome too.
Firefox starts to be very bad browser to the performance aspect. And crashes a lot. Even without extensions. If you stay with many tabs open in some time it become slow.
Chrome for me has the problem of privacy. It collects all things you do in internet and send to Google to “Inprove” their services. Actually for me Chrome sell information about your internet preferences like Gmail does with your e-mail and Android does with your calls and SMS (did you read the new policy? You should).
“If you’re part of the 80% of people who visit my site in Firefox or a WebKit browser, what would it take to make Internet Explorer your default browser? Is it possible?”
I may consider it if they open source it !!