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This article aims to be an unbiased historical record for the usage share of Web Browser s (but ideally Layout Engine s, as it is what matters), based on Statistics and Article s published by well-known Website s. One of the use of such statistics is to create a graph that roughly represents the Browser Wars . This also serves as a reference for the various web browser articles.

''This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date.'' It should be noted that while the record was achieved unbiased, the record itselfs may not totally reflect the fact, i.e. there may be certain degrees of overestimation and underestimation. It also does not account for the regional differences in market share.


IN GENERAL

Usage share, in web browser statistics, is the percentage of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular browser. For example, when it is said that Internet Explorer has 85% usage share, that means that Internet Explorer is used by 85% of visitors that visit a given set of sites. Typically, the user agent string is used to identify which browser a visitor is using.


OVERESTIMATION AND UNDERESTIMATION

Note that measuring browser usage in terms of 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 usage of that user agent would then be overestimated. Some examples:

  • A web browser that refreshes the Webpage at a regular time interval.

  • Browsers such as Opera are set by default to report in as Internet Explorer for compatibility reasons. Opera does, however, include ''Opera'' in its user-agent string and is generally properly detected by web stats programs.

  • A feed reader that requests the RSS / Atom feed at a regular time interval.

  • Extra files like CSS hacks and JavaScript hacks are often sent to Internet Explorer as it contains a number of bugs and does not support W3C standards fully.

  • Gecko based browsers do Link Prefetching which increases hits.


It is also possible to underestimate the usage share, for example:

  • A graphical browser typically results in more requests than a text browser, as it downloads referred by the HTML document, e.g. Image , CSS , and JavaScript .

  • A computer with more memory will likely cache more webpages in memory, resulting in less requests.

  • Many Browsers and Download Managers spoof a different User Agent String to the Web Server to prevent erroneous/malicious browser sniffing which could lead in receiving broken/incompatible code, or being completely blocked, thus increasing the statistics for other browsers.


These problems could be avoided by using measures in terms of unique visitors to web sites rather than page hits. This can be achieved by using IP Address and Cookie s. However, many web statistics software that only gather data from the web server logs do not provide this kind of measurement.


1999 AND EARLIER


GVU WWW User Survey



International Data Corporation



ZD Market Intelligence



Zona Research



AdKnowledge



2000 TO PRESENT


WebSideStory



TheCounter.com



OneStat.com



ADTECH



Net Applications



SEE ALSO



EXTERNAL LINKS