New trend on browser usage share?

Something "bizarre" happened on January/2012 - according to numbers from Net Applications.

- Internet Explorer gained 1.09 points for a share of 52.96 percent.

- Firefox dropped 0.95 points to 20.88 points.

- Chrome's share also fell, down 0.15 points to 18.94 percent.

- Safari declined down 0.07 points to 4.9 percent.

- Opera was unchanged, up 0.01 points to 1.67 percent.

Source: www.netmarketshare.com

 

I wouldn't quite call a single instance a trend. Maybe if we see this happen next month it'll be something ot talk about.

 

One month rise is not a trend.
Maybe the previous month was a one off dip due to all the corporate IE6 users taking winter holidays.
Need future months figures to start seeing if this is a glitch or a trend.

Edit: Hungry Man beat me to it !

Cheers, Nick

 

But Jan has 31 days and daily data is available if I understand correctly. The last big move up came when they included China's stats if I remember correctly.

 

Spooky!

Even more spooky!

 

It all depends on their ad-serving network, which quite a number of people block (more so with newer browsers). Also, the data is dependant on who visits the ad embedded sites, not necessarily the number of new installs.

 

Not that many people block ads but yes there's definitely going to be discrepancies. It's also the type of people who might visit a site etc.

On Wilders Firefox is the most popular browser and on another forum I visit (much larger sample size, over 1k users on the poll) Chrome is the most popular browser. It's just weird like that.

 

On Wilders nearly twice the amount of voters preferred Firefox to Chrome. Isn't the fact that it wasn't more close statistically relevant?

 

You should also consider the age of the poll. Wilders' one is very recent.

 

The poll I'm talking about was a week ago and lasted for 24 hours.

EDIT: Not that any of it matters. 1k users is still a tiny sample size.

 

Perhaps it just means more people are using virtual machines with Windows XP loaded.....with IE6, funny as that may sound.

 

I won't comment on FireFox