101.3% marketshare for IE?

A little terminology question...

[gmiller]

I've been away for a while, and while catching up on some posts here I kept seeing that 95% number we keep hearing about. One person even referred to IE having "95%-98%" marketshare.

Now, a few days back, I saw a news article about OS marketshare. The numbers were pretty similar to what you usually hear, but with Windows continuing to slowly gain ground. As I recall, the numbers were 93.8% Windows, 2.9% Mac, and about 1% Linux, with the rest being a variety of systems.

95% marketshare for IE would represent 98.2% marketshare on Windows and the Mac. 98% overall marketshare would be 101.3% marketshare on those platforms.

100% marketshare would be a literal monopoly. During the antitrust case, the term "virtual monopoly" was widely used to mean something close to 100%. So my question is this: what's the proper term for 101%? Super Monopoly? Hyper Monopoly? Bogusstatsfromwebcountersopoly?

These statistically propaganda wars are a little freaky to me. Someone in another forum recently went so far as to take the Google graph of browser usage and count the pixels in order to estimate marketshare percentages from that, leading to a figure of about 5% for Mozilla and 88% for IE. Personally, my sites get higher percentages for both, around 8% Mozilla and 90% IE.

[RonPK]

Some things people should (imho) keep in mind when looking at these kind of statistics:
* definitions: browser usage is not necessarily the same as market share
* it's allways risky to combine data from different samples
* what market? US? Global? Tora Bora? apple.com?

[jim_w]

It is not a 'Monopoly' if people choose IE over others. The law suites were over MS not allowing 3rd parties to install other browsers on the OEM install packages.

You just cannot throw a bunch of numbers together and call it statistics. I mean you can, but it has no meaning. There are theories with meaning behind statistics.

[shasan]

alls I know is that the logs from the sites I've operated have always pointed to a 95-96% IE 'market share' at least in population of visitors to MY site.

But if I didn't have a site yet and was deciding if I should spend the extra 'vigilance' money to make my future site look good in all browsers, I would probably look up some silly statistics like that.

Truthfully though, they would be enough for me to make a decision even if not scientifically significant. They're pretty overwhelming and consistent where-ever I find them.

shasan.

[tedster]

The number that I keep getting across many sites (and a statistic that's most troubling to me as a developer) is 8% Macintosh -- and 75% of those on IE. IE on the mac is a bad news browser. If you think IE on a PC has CSS problems, you ain't seen nothin' till you get a hard look at how IE renders your code on a mac.

From what I see with my music business contacts, however, Mac users often have a "toolkit" of several browsers available, just out of self-defense. They're used to switching browsers just to make a website work.

[richardb]

Depends upon yer TM

we've got 1 client who's M$ % is less than 50%

Tedster I'm interested in

Mac users often have a "toolkit" of several browsers available

Care to tell?

Rich

[hartlandcat]

All he means is that most Mac users have several browsers installed on their computer, and unlike Windows users, don't tend to use one browser for all of the time (like the way I use Netscape all the time). They instead switch between browsers, and will normally have Safari, MacIE, A gecko-based browser and sometimes even iCab or OmniWeb 4.0.

we've got 1 client who's M$ % is less than 50%

That doesn't surprise me. I know of a website that gets 91% Netscape/Mozilla users (no prizes for guessing which site that is).

The Bottom Line: Ignore "general" statistics from Google, TheCounter.com and the like, and always go by your statistics. Browser (and OS) usage can vary widely depending on the type of site you have.

[BlueSky]

As the number of vistiors to my site has grown, the percentage of IE users has continued to decrease. Right now, they only make up 75.6%. A few really busy sites at my host told me they're seeing a decrease too. They're in the low to mid 80's right now. I don't know what source these journalists use for reporting marketshare stats or what market they even mean, but we're haven't this increase.

[tedster]

...most Mac users have several browsers installed on their computer

Exactly. It's not uncommon to see the same IP address come in on mac/IE5 and then switch to mac/Safari, for instance.

Just last week I caught a problem on a set of pages
exactly that way. I wondered why and discovered that
IE5/mac was not drawing scrollbars for those pages.
And the only fix I could find was to use <center>
tags (oh, the shame of it!)