NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Usage share

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 a 86% usage share, that means that Internet Explorer is used by 86% of visitors that visit a given set of sites. Typically, the user agent string is used to identify which browser a visitor is using. Image File history File links Comparison of layout engine/web browser usage share (market share) over time. ... Image File history File links Comparison of layout engine/web browser usage share (market share) over time. ... A layout engine, or rendering engine, is a software that takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc) and displays the formatted content on the screen. ... Web browser shortcuts on an Apple computer A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. ... Web browser shortcuts on an Apple computer A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with HTML documents hosted by web servers or held in a file system. ... A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of webpages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. ... Internet Explorer, abbreviated IE or MSIE, is a proprietary web browser made by Microsoft and currently available as part of Microsoft Windows. ... A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the World Wide Web. ...

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, presumably for compatibility reasons.
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 webpage or web page is a page of the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. ... Opera is a computer application for handling most common internet-related tasks, including: web browsing, sending and receiving messages, managing contacts and online chat. ... It has been suggested that RDF Site Summary be merged into this article or section. ... Atom is an XML-based document format for the syndication of web content such as weblogs and news headlines, and an HTTP-based protocol for editing weblogs based on the format. ... Gecko is the open-source web browser layout engine used in Mozilla, later Netscape releases and several other products. ... Link prefetching is a standards compliant mechanism used by web browsers, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. ...

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 to cache more webpages in the 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 completly 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 cookies. However, many web statistics software that only gather data from the web server logs do not provide this kind of measurement. In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ... A digital image is a representation of a two-dimensional image as a finite set of digital values, called picture elements or pixels. ... In computing, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. ... JavaScript is an object-based scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. ... A web browser is a software package that enables a user to display and interact with documents hosted by web servers. ... A download manager is a computer program designed to download files from the Internet, unlike a web browser, which is mainly intended to browse webpages on the World Wide Web (with file downloading being of secondary importance). ... A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the World Wide Web. ... The term web server can mean one of two things: A computer that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients, which are known as web browsers, and serving them web pages, which are usually HTML documents. ... An IP address is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a network utilizing the [Internet Protocol]] standard. ... An HTTP magic cookie (usually called simply a cookie) is a packet of information sent by a server to a World Wide Web browser and then sent back by the browser each time it accesses that server. ...

See also