NetMarketShare announced the abandonment of the operating system and browser share statistics

NetMarketShare is a well-known market research company. The company provides a desktop browser and operating system market share data that is often reported by the media.

The company recently released browser market share statistics for November 2020. Unfortunately, this is the last time this company has released such statistics.

The reason for the decision to abandon the continued statistics of market share information is that Google Chrome will adjust the traditional user agent string to make it more difficult to identify.

Google’s reason for doing this is to protect user privacy, but various network services that rely on the use of user-agent strings to collect information will become paralyzed.

We know that the user agent string (commonly known as UA) is an identifier generated by the browser according to the hardware and software environment to identify system data.

For example, the information provided by the UA string can let the website know the operating system and version, browser name, browser version, and kernel version used by the visitor.

The use of the UA string in good faith includes identifying whether the user is a desktop or mobile device, so as to load to the desktop or mobile version of the website to improve the user experience.

However, advertising networks will also use UA strings to track users in order to deliver accurate advertisements. Google’s adjustment of UA strings is actually to improve privacy protection.

According to Google, the subsequent UA string will be streamlined and only provide the necessary information. Websites and ad networks cannot even identify whether the user is desktop or mobile.

The company’s statistical browser and operating system market share is actually recognized by UA strings, which are very important for data statistics.

However, after Google’s adjustment, the company will not be able to continue to identify browser and platform information, which will eventually seriously affect the accuracy of these market share statistics.

Of course, NetMarketShare abandoning such statistics is not only caused by Google, because various robots and crawlers are also seriously affecting the accuracy of data.

At present, the number of false visits caused by high-frequency visits by robots and crawlers on the entire Internet is much higher than that of normal users, which means that statistics need to be eliminated.

However, it became more and more difficult to identify and eliminate such data, and the company could not accept that the accuracy of its statistical data was getting lower and lower, so it finally decided to give up completely.

At some point in the future, this company will make a comeback, but the focus is on e-commerce trends and verifiable user data, and browser market shares will no longer provide data.