Net Applications Adds Country Level Weighting

It’s market share/installed base/whatever time! Net Applications’ figures had been under review for a while, and now we know why: they’ve finally done what should have been done ages ago. Namely, they’ve added country-level weighting to their figures. They also added this retrospectively, meaning all previous figures have been updated to reflect the change. This has devastating effects for some.

Country-level weighting is quite important when it comes to the way Net Applications collects its figures. “We adjust our reports proportionally based on how much traffic we record from a country vs. how many internet users that country has,” they explain on their website, “For example, although we have significant data from China, it is relatively small compared to the number of internet users in China. Therefore, we now weight Chinese traffic proportionally higher in our global reports.” This makes the worldwide view of these statistics more accurate. They use CIA data as the source for internet users per country.

So, what does this mean? Well, for operating systems, since the Mac is much more popular inside the United States than outside, this change has drastically reduced the figures for Mac OS X: worldwide share “dropped” from 10% to 5%. Windows went up from 88% to 93%, while Linux remained stable at its 1%.

The browser view per version shows a much more grim view: Internet Explorer 6 is now, once again, the world’s most widely used browser (according to these statistics, of course), holding a 27% share. Internet Explorer as a whole gained a bit at the expense of Safari, while Firefox remained stable at 22%. Opera’s share goes up to 2%, reflecting its popularity in Eastern Europe and Asia. Chrome has a share of 2.6%.

Happy commenting.

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