Microsoft Says Chrome Market Share Records are Misleading
Part of the entertainment of watching browser market share statistics is the interpretation of data, the consideration of validity as well as the reaction of browser makers.
Obviously, statistics carry marketing value in a negative or positive view and there is a clear motivation to comment on numbers that are primarily published by NetApplications and StatCounter (even if there are plenty more sources such as Clicky, StatOwl, or W3 Browser Statistics).
While Mozilla and Google have been largely quiet about market shares (but certainly care, as mentioned by Mozilla CTO in this blog post), Microsoft has used market share numbers only from Net Applications to highlight the decrease of importance of IE6 and the runaway success of IE9, especially on the dedicated blog Exploring IE. Last week, Microsoft reacted to data published by StatCounter that Chrome has exceeded IE market share for the first time. Microsoft's opinion is that StatCounter's data are slanted and incorrect and best. The reason? StatCounter evenly counts market share across its user base and does not consider geoweighting. To make matters worse, StatCounter also considers Google's prerendering feature, which obviously puts a positive spin on Google's data.
Without going too deep into analytics, Microsoft complains that the pages that are pre-rendered in Google's Omnibox count for market share at StatCounter. In February, pre-rendering counted for 4.3 percent of market share, Microsoft says. Also, Microsoft believes that, depending on the available data set, browser market share data has to be weighed against the entire Internet population. For example, China (where Microsoft dominates the browser market share arena) has 21.39 percent of the Internet population, according to CIA Internet user statistics, but it has only 0.96 percent in StatCounter's data.
According to Internet World Stats, the CIA estimate may be a bit conservative, as the user share in China could actually approach 25 percent. So, does Microsoft has a point? Sure. But we should not forget that NetApplications has also its problems as the scientific process of data collection isn't entirely transparent with missing margins of error, for example. My personal gripe with NetApplications has been that the freely available data change on a frequent basis and the company has denied consistent access to the same data sets over time. For example, Net Applications has strongly limited access to market share data to the fragmented versions of IE. Were they removed because of monetization reasons? Because of integration into IE overall? We have no idea as the company declined to comment. I cannot help but have some doubt about the data distribution between browser versions and within a browser itself. I am not accusing NetApplications of shady data publications, but there are clearly inconsistencies that make it difficult from the outside to assess the value of the data.
Like NetApplications, StatCounter has its issues as well. It is common sense to assume that no market share estimate can be entirely correct and there will always be opportunities to criticize the data published and interpret the data in the way you prefer. Those on the outside have to remember that browser market share statistics are merely trend indicators. In any case, absolute numbers should always be taken with a grain of salt.

You guys forget that IE is actually decent now. Nothing like the old interweb exploder 6. Although I'd still never use it due to the lack of useful plugins, it's no longer objectively bad in every possible aspect. Heck, it even beats Firefox and Chrome in Flash while having strong showings in HTML5 compliance and acceleration.
And for the average user, using IE instead of Chrome or Firefox to browse facebook is not going give them a substantially different experience. Many people who install chrome or FF don't even take advantage of the plugins at all; they simply think "well it's better" and use the vanilla install, perceiving web browsing as being overall faster and better when the difference is objectively negligible.
Chrome, Firefox is the superior browser regardless of what microsoft says
I see that the best data is slanted and incorrect over here.
You guys forget that IE is actually decent now. Nothing like the old interweb exploder 6. Although I'd still never use it due to the lack of useful plugins, it's no longer objectively bad in every possible aspect. Heck, it even beats Firefox and Chrome in Flash while having strong showings in HTML5 compliance and acceleration.
And for the average user, using IE instead of Chrome or Firefox to browse facebook is not going give them a substantially different experience. Many people who install chrome or FF don't even take advantage of the plugins at all; they simply think "well it's better" and use the vanilla install, perceiving web browsing as being overall faster and better when the difference is objectively negligible.
Chromes growth has nothing to do with it's technical accomplishments, but more to to with having to decline it at every turn when installing programs.
That stats are misleading, and Tom's seems to be in a chrome love in.
internet explorer is horrible, even in its current incarnation, flash plays like crap, it loads things slow, and all around is unable to beat out chrome in speed, or firefox in usefulness.
and for some reason for me ie9 still cant play flash as well as chrome.
i would think that even MS pretty much dont care if you use their browser, you're useing their OS.
and i think thats what really matters
What you do with your web browser can make the differences between the browsers more pronounced in some situations. It's like graphics cards and CPUs, you use the browser most suited to your needs if you really care about that. I have several browsers for different situations including Palemoon (performance-optimized Firefox), Comodo Dragon (security and slightly performance-optimized Chrome), Lunascape (has all three of the most common rendering engines Trident (IE), Gecko(FF), and Webkit(Chrome, Safari)), and Opera.
I have add-ons like Ad-block, fasterfox, and several others to get more performance and security out of the system.
Now more on topic for the article, pretty much all market share data could be called misleading. Is MS in the wrong for saying that a certain statistic is misleading? no. However, like any other company, they don't publicly admit that EVERYONE regarded here is either wrong, misleading, or both.
MS sneakily returned it from my "hidden" updates and automatically stuck it in with other updates... I immediately uninstalled it. That was pretty freaking lame though. I'll probably turn off auto updates as well now because of that BS.
Q - How many of you guys 'Bing' vs 'Google'? ... you have your answer.
Yeah, I saw this graph already:
I prefer Chrome and I have ALL of them installed (old to current) for site testing. However, IMO use the browser you like best and renders the pages correctly (1.2 vs 1.15 sec is meaningless unless you're a Borg). The last thing I want to do is to get into mine's better than yours argument.