• Chrome vs Firefox figures in the press.
• Statistical complexity hides multiple truths.
• OS, browser and vendor figures too generalised.

Many of the headline figures quoted in the technology press about the technology used to access the internet are misleading and do not give a sufficiently detailed enough picture relevant to much of the world’s population.

Partly, that’s down to who reports on published statistics and the tendency to use worldwide averages of figures on OS use, browser choice, preferred social media platform, search engine, device vendors, and so on.

A recent case in point are the figures published by StatCounter that are widely trailed across the tech press, which, logically, puts global averages ‘above the fold’ in all results. These are used by many professional journalists as headline figures on which pronouncements and comments are made; the Chrome vs Firefox issue a fine example.

But as any digital marketing professional knows, it’s local tendencies and preferences that are the statistics to pay attention to – these are, after all, the people whose campaigns address targeted audiences, and the more accurate and granular the targeting, the better the performance of their spending. If marketers based their activities on global averages for any aspect of a demographic, they’d quickly be out of a job.

Although there are inherent inaccuracies in any figures collated even in part by automated means (reading a web browser’s user agent, for instance), oft-quoted statistics have a habit of becoming repeated. The post-truth reality, well proven by such keen advocates as Elon Musk and Donald Trump, is that by repeating something enough times, a single fact or figure, or a lie or part-lie, becomes good enough to be regarded as true. In short, complete codswallop becomes fact, and a thousand conspiracy theories are born – the Earth is flat, global warming isn’t happening, and immigration is the sole cause of dire economic and social situations.

So with all standard provisos and caveats in place and many pinches of salt to hand, the detail of the latest StatCounter statistics makes much more interesting and relevant reading.

Safari vs Chrome vs Firefox: browser market shares

A case in point is the type of web browser favoured by internet users. Supporters and critics of Mozilla (bizarrely, the two are often one and the same) and its sole relevant product, the Firefox browser, state that its market share in the browser wars is around 4-5%. That’s certainly what the statistics show – at least, in the US and Canada – which tells us more about the nationalities of the technology news pundits than how popular using Firefox is.

Over the pond in Germany, for example – population 82m, GDP $4.6tn and the world’s third richest nation – StatCounter tells is the market share is 11%. In the UK, the browser languishes at under 3%. To put that into the context of population, in North America there are 13.7 million Firefox users, and Germany has 9.25 million folk browsing the web without sending personal and work data to Google and Apple.

In India, Chrome is the preferred browser, used by 88.4% of users (some 1.28 billion people), while in the US, Chrome’s share pegs at 50.57% of users – 169 million people. Does that mean freedom-loving Americans actively avoid Chrome and its frankly creepy habit of phoning home to Mountain View? No. Rather, US citizens love their iPhones and its Safari browser (33.4% of sites visited by Americans were loaded by an Apple device) so preferring to send their personally identifiable data to Cupertino. The less well-off Indians, favouring cheaper Android mobiles, are more likely to run (the default) Chrome browser.

World share

Further complexities and misnomers can be found in the ways in which statistics are generally carved up and presented, not just by StatCounter but by most other statistical presentations. That happens for the natural purposes of brevity and easy dissection. Asia, for example, includes China and all the problems associated with gathering statistics on most things (internet use included) from outside its borders. Asia also includes the economic powerhouses of Singapore (population 5.9 million), Japan and Korea, plus the relative backwaters of Laos (population 7 million) and Vietnam. Oceania lumps together Australia and Polynesia into a single statistical mass.

Just as visitors to and citizens of the US and Europe can attest, the geographical distances between two points may be small, but the demographics on the ground are sometimes wildly different. That’s also true for the rest of the world.

Conclusions

The problem arises when decisions are made and preferences formed based on partial or generalised reporting that’s repeated so often it becomes the sole reality. The world is huge (and round, by the way) – Oceania covers literally half the globe – and highly populated. Many of our fellow physical Earth inhabitants look different and speak differently from us, but the online world is a great leveller.

We need to start talking about the world’s online population as a single mass and devise new ways to section it up. This level of detail can be found, but it is not as easily discovered and relayed. Accepting multiple versions of ‘truth’ is one of the great challenges facing us internet denizens.