Chrome browser reduced market share for 2 consecutive months

Net Applications, a web tracking company, admits that it has calculated "hands-on" about Chrome's use.

In February 2012, the market share of Internet Explorer browser (IE) decreased slightly after the largest increase ever seen in January 2012. Google's Chrome dropped for the second consecutive month in Net Application statistics after the company admitted it had "swung" in calculating Chrome's market share for months.

Net Applications acknowledges that it has calculated that Chrome's market share is larger than it actually is, because Chrome has a ' pre-rendering ' feature that allows downloading some pages in the background as soon as the user is typing. address, and users can view or not view after these pages have been downloaded.

This feature was released in August 2011 with the Chrome 13 version, and was enhanced in Chrome 17. According to Net Applications , pre-rendering generates visits but the user has not viewed it, should not be included in marketing. Chrome part.

Starting with data from February 2012, Net Applications adjusted Chrome's market share, excluding the preloaded pages that users did not see, only counted by actual user pages. " Pre-rendering in February 2012 accounted for 4.3% of Chrome's daily visitors ," Net Applications said. Chrome is the only major browser currently offering pre-rendering features.

According to the new calculation method, Chrome's market share decreased by about half a percentage point, and ended in February 2012 with 18.9%, lower than the December 19.1% peak. Chrome is still in third place, behind Mozilla's IE and Firefox. Meanwhile, IE lost more than 0.1 percentage points, accounting for 52.8% of all browsers used on desktops and laptops, while Firefox moved sideways at 20.9%.

In February 2012, Safari was the web browser with the largest increase, adding 0.3 percentage points to 5.2%, the highest since Net Applications tracked. Net Applications calculates browser market share with data collected from more than 160 million unique visitors, browsing 40,000 web pages monitored by the company.