Super Jamie
Forum Staple
Posts: 2664
Registered: 03-08 |
Maes said:
All fine and well, except that nobody is actually being paid
Wrong.
Browser share is measured by collecting the User Agent from the browser when it requests pages from a webserver. Parties who release browser share information collate their numbers from a variety of sources, with the idea logically to survey a diverse range of sites to provide an impartial view of the "browsersphere".
For example, a news site is likely to be visited by regular everyday people just doing their usual stuff on their personal computer, probably with their browser of choice. This may provide a more impartial idea than say a site for web standards, which is is likely to be visited by more people interested in that subject and often those people will use a non-IE browser. The W3 site above is a good example of this. Services such as Google Analytics exist to provide this info to webmasters, so they can better tailor their site to their main audience if they so desire.
Sure it's not exactly accurate, but when you're talking two decimal points of a percent over millions of installs, it's accurate enough. Trends are usually the best any mass application of statistics can hope to achieve, and they do circumstantially prove that something is happening, and it's happening more or less over time.
You can get more info out of a browser, such as someone's IP address which allows geolocation to extrapolate location, language, timezone, etc etc. You can see the referring URL, so you can tell if most of your visitors are coming in from Google, or another search engine, or via a link someone else has put to your page.
A browser is not just a software device for displaying webpages. Most commonly, it can be the primary window into a "default" search provider (and probably the only way Bing will get its' foot in the door with IE8), which can be very lucrative as the link at the top of my post shows. A browser can also be an application platform, allowing one party to gain and keep market share if their advantage is good enough. Ain't no ActiveX on Linux! You want that, you need to run Windows. "This site is attacking you, but luckily Microsoft protected you. Click here to find more ways Microsoft is protecting you." While you're there, buy Windows 7, buy the new Office, buy everything!
Whilst I'm sure the Mozilla project started out as a philanthropic effort to continue the Netscape code based on the belief that it was simply a better browser, the market for making programs that display webpages is definitely money-driven today.
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06-30-09 00:04 
