Google Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most used browser

You can replace the word love for the word hate and reach similar conclusions ..

 

No argument there. Either way it's a losing situation.

 

Seems the weights assigned by the other one have carried weight. To me they're more like Finnegan's Finagling Factor. And as for the prerendering, doesn't Firefox also prefetch?

 

Firefox does prefetch, yes, but that and pre-rendering like Chrome are different. Chrome basically loads the entire page and all its elements, Firefox, I think just gets the URL. My information is from what I read here: http://groups.google.com/a/chromium...read/thread/92cacec850ca668e/a21add9e8b653f32.

 

Firefox prefetches and resolves DNS. Chrome actually loads a part of the webpage.

But there's no reason for prerendering to effect this as there's a clear difference in the header it sends. All statcounter has to do (I'm surprised they don't if they in fact don't) is sort that header out.

edit: DW that's correct. Firefox and Chrome (and I believe IE and Opera) will resolve DNS for all links on a page.

I haven't clicked the link that you've posted but the DNS request has already been made because it's on this page.

 

I think I'm done here in this thread.

Just make sure you harden the browser settings that it does offer and in your firewall rules limit it powers to the minimum you need.


See ya

 

I think that all browsers have good & irritating points. I've often wondered what it would be like if all of the things I like in various different browsers were combined into one super-browser!

I also still can't understand why Safari is doing so well. It works well enough on a Mac but it's terrible on Windows & yet I have seen 'statistics' showing that its use is actually growing (on Windows).

Regardless of any 'statistical' gibberish, my belief is that IE is the most used browser in the world, for the simple reason that it is bundled with Windows. Most people, that I know personally, have no idea that alternative browsers even exist. And this is regardless of Chrome's fanatical advertising campaign.

I'm a huge fan of John T. Haller's PortableApps & use them regularly at work. The SeaMonkey & Maxthon portables especially make life a lot easier for me there. I wonder if a portable IE would be popular? LOL! Having said that, IE9 64 bit is quite good on my desktop PC. Although I far prefer Waterfox.

 

There's a big difference. Chrome has expanded the behavior in version 17 to include search queries typed into the omnibox. Chrome is the only major desktop browser that currently has this feature, which creates unviewed visits that should not be counted in Chrome’s usage share. However, the pages that are eventually viewed by the user should be treated normally.

Chrome is opening separate Chrome tabs based on user search queries at Google.com or from Chrome’s Omnibox that are invisible to the user. If the user then clicks these search links, then the tab and page will display. However, a certain portion of these links will never be clicked and the user will never see them – remaining invisible to them and therefore not real user page views of those prerendered sites.

 

Chrome opens invisible tabs?!

Now, that's just plain scary!

 

The way preloading works is taht if I type in: W

Chrome will load up Widlers because it's my most visited site that starts with W (probably the only site I've visited more than once with W.)

It'll do the same for whatever your default search engine is, whether it's Google or DDG or whatever. This way if instead of going to Wilders I search for W it'll have that loaded up (although I don't think it'll preload both, so if I've never gone to a W site it'll load up the search engine instead.)

If someone posts a link on Wilders on a page I'm viewing Chrome will resolve the DNS for that link.

That's pretty much all there is to it. There's a preload header for it all so it's really simple for statcounter to filter it all out.

Preloading is also really accurate and only applies to sites that you've already visited so I can't see this skewing results that much.

 

If you search for anything in the Omnibox, Chrome will open the results in invisible tabs, regardless if you visited the sites or not.

I think this "new" feature (as of Chrome 17) is useful but it really skews results. As NetApplications said here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/prerendering.aspx

" Within the sites in our network, prerendering in February 2012 accounted for 4.3% of Chrome's daily unique visitors. These visits will now be excluded from Chrome's desktop browser share. "

 

"Chrome is the only major desktop browser that currently has this feature, which creates unviewed visits that should not be counted in Chrome’s usage share. However, the pages that are eventually viewed by the user should be treated normally. " ~ op cit

Hmmm ... curiouser & curiouser ...

I take it that this is for overall speed?

 

Yes, it certainly improves speed in some scenarios. This can't be denied.

 

I'm talking about being counted as a page hit. What constitutes a page hit. And no comments about the unilateral "weighting" Or is that not significant because Statcounter doesn't use it

 

http://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Unique

http://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Country

http://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#QC

These are the key differences now.