The Battle of the Browsers, Part 2

graphNot too long ago I wrote a post about the most popular operating systems and browsers on the Internet (read here). I quoted statistics from the w3schools Web site, which gave Firefox the number one spot among all browsers. They collected data for over 5 years and came to this conclusion. Internet Explorer (6, 7 and 8 combined) came at second place with about 35%.

However, I read an interesting article about the funeral for IE6 on the CNN web site, and their source was Netmarketshare.com. According to their browser market share information, Internet Explorer (all versions) leads the way with about 55%, and Firefox (3.0 and 3.5) is far behind with 20%. Now that’s a considerable difference to w3schools stats.

I wonder how those Web sites collect and analyse their information. After all, the difference in Firefox usage is over 30% (46% vs 20%). There is some explanation on the W3schools site:

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers. These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users. Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools’ log-files, over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.”

So which one is more accurate….?

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