October 2008: Firefox, Opera gain & IE, Safari, Chrome drop
Submitted by srlinuxx on Sat, 11/22/2008 - 08:09.
Chrome arrived two months ago, and while we had mostly positive thoughts about what Google was bringing to the table, we were also interested to see how the market would change from August to September. Chrome amassed a higher market share than Opera in its first month, stealing market share from the speedy browser, as well as IE and Firefox. Only Safari gained as well. This month, things have flipped around completely, except for Microsoft.
Between September and October, Internet Explorer dropped by a quarter of a percent: from 71.52 percent to 71.27 percent (quite a small drop for IE, compared to other months). Firefox has rebounded, jumping by 0.51 percent (from 19.46 percent to 19.97 percent), Safari dropped a minor 0.08 percent (from 6.65 percent to 6.57 percent), Opera grabbed the number four spot back by gaining 0.06 (0.69 percent to 0.75 percent) while Chrome dropped 0.04 percent (from 0.78 percent to 0.74 percent). The market share pie for October 2008, according to Net Applications, looks like this:
Net Applications is noice
It's better to ignore it.
As I recently reported, there is an order of magnitude difference between the market share of Linux “out there” in the world, and the market share of LInux on Scienceblogs.com and on this very blog. Subsequently, I was trolled by my very own brother “… so, when is Luniux going to reach 1% market share?….” and this item has come out on ZDNet (which we all know is essentially funded by Microsoft, right?): Linux - Still chasing that elusive 1% market share.
[…]
So I went and looked. Here is the description of the database used by the Market Share service that everyone seems to rely on:
We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly basis.
WTF?
Is this supposed to be some kind of unbiased sample? But wait, there’s more…
[…]
The complexity of this problem is actually rather large. But I can tell you one thing: If you were my graduate student and you came to me with this sampling strategy, I’d send you back to kindergarten. (If I had that power.)
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen