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anonymous908213yesterday at 2:39 PM1 replyview on HN

My go-to reference is this, which itself cites statcounter: https://caniuse.com/usage-table

I was specifically referencing desktop Chrome, not including Chrome for Android, but other than that, if there are discrepancies, I'm not sure what the cause is.


Replies

crazygringoyesterday at 4:07 PM

Very interesting.

The Timo Tijhof data is based on Wikipedia visits, and shouldn't be affected by adblockers.

Meanwhile, StatCounter is based on sites that use its analytics, and on users not using adblockers that might block it. The CanIUse table makes clear there's a long tail of outdated Chrome versions that each individually have tiny usage, but they seem to add up.

It's fascinating they're so wildly different. I'm inclined to think Wikipedia, being the #9 site on the web [1], is going to produce a more accurate distribution of users overall. I can't help but wonder if StatCounter is used by a ton of relatively low-traffic sites, and the long tail of outdated Chrome is actually headless Chrome crawlers, and so they make up a large proportion relative to actual user traffic? Since they're not pushed to update, the way consumers are. And especially with ad-blocking real users excluded too?

Anecdotally, in web development I just haven't seen users complain about sites not working in Chrome, where it turns out the culprit is outdated Chrome. In contrast to complaints about e.g. not working in Firefox, which happen all the time. Or where it breaks in Chrome but it turns out it's an extension interfering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites