> That suggestions that netmarketshare are consistently measuring IE high
That's because those tables arae
StatCounter (and the W3Counter/Wikimedia things in the tables you cite) are measuring website visits.
NetApplications/netmarketshare is measuring unique users.
So what that data shows is likely several things going on at once:
1) Chrome (and Firefox, for that matter, if you look at te the tables)) users load more webpages than IE users.
2) Chrome does some webpage prerendering stuff that can get counted as "visits" if you're not very careful; not sure how well StatCounter accounts for this.
3) Likely some differences in the actual base data, though I expect this is really minor compared to item #1.
Of course I couldn't agree more with your general claim that web-wide statistics are a poor replacement for specific statistics for a particular site. But even there the question of "visits" vs "unique users" might be an important one.
Self-replying, since I have no idea what happened to the comment text I _meant_ to write and I can't edit it now. What I meant to say at the beginning of my comment was:
That's because those tables are comparing apples and oranges. StatCounter (and the W3Counter/Wikimedia things in the tables you cite) are measuring website visits. NetApplications/netmarketshare is measuring unique users.
That's because those tables arae
StatCounter (and the W3Counter/Wikimedia things in the tables you cite) are measuring website visits.
NetApplications/netmarketshare is measuring unique users.
So what that data shows is likely several things going on at once:
1) Chrome (and Firefox, for that matter, if you look at te the tables)) users load more webpages than IE users.
2) Chrome does some webpage prerendering stuff that can get counted as "visits" if you're not very careful; not sure how well StatCounter accounts for this.
3) Likely some differences in the actual base data, though I expect this is really minor compared to item #1.
Of course I couldn't agree more with your general claim that web-wide statistics are a poor replacement for specific statistics for a particular site. But even there the question of "visits" vs "unique users" might be an important one.