Usage share of web browsers

The usage share of web browsers is the proportion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser. Web browser usage share varies from region to region as well as through time. Depending on how "usage share" is defined, the results can vary greatly. In particular, page views versus unique visits will produce different results.

Measuring browser usage in the number of requests (page hits) made by each user agent can be misleading.

Not all requests are generated by a user, as a user agent can make requests at regular time intervals without user input. In this case, the user's activity might be overestimated. Some examples:

It is also possible to underestimate the usage share by using the number of requests, for example:

Websites often include code to detect browser version to adjust the page design sent according to the user agent string received. This may mean that less-popular browsers are not sent complex content (even though they might be able to deal with it correctly) or, in extreme cases, refused all content. Thus, various browsers have a feature to cloak or spoof their identification to force certain server-side content.

Net Applications, in their NetMarketShare report, uses unique visitors to measure web usage. This has the effect that users visiting a site ten times will only be counted once by these sources, while they are counted ten times by statistics companies that measure page hits.

To supplement statistics from their unique visitors measurements Net Applications uses country-level weighting. The goal of weighting countries based on their usage is to combat selection area based sampling bias caused by discrepancies in the percentage of tracked hits in the sample and the percentage of global usage documented by third party sources caused by the heavier levels of market usage.

Statistics from the United States government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP) clearly do not represent world-wide usage patterns, although at least one expert considers it the most reliable US data source. DAP uses raw data from a unified Google Analytics account.

According to StatCounter, as of January 2016^[update], Chrome is not only the most popular browser on phones (or phones plus tablets) (while for tablet only browsing, Safari on iPad has 61.13% share, followed by Chrome, that inherited its engine and web standard support; Safari is not available for Android); when counting across all platforms, Chrome is also the most popular and if only desktop platforms are counted, it has more than half of that market. No desktop browser has had a clear majority for a long time, since Internet Explorer lost it and Netscape before it. Other statistics/analysts show similar numbers.

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