IE Browser Market Share: What Are the Real Statistics?

"If you scroll down W3Schools says this is just the data collected from their site.

Browsers that count for less than 0.5%
are not listed.

W3Schools is a website for people with
an interest for web technologies.
These people are more interested in
using alternative browsers than the
average user. The average user tends
to use Internet Explorer, since it
comes preinstalled with Windows. Most
do not seek out other browsers.

These facts indicate that the browser
figures above are not 100% realistic.
Other web sites have statistics
showing that Internet Explorer is used
by at least 80% of the users.

Anyway, our data, collected from
W3Schools' log-files, over a five year
period, clearly shows the long and
medium-term trends

Wikipedia linked to the counter who does not say how they got their data. But I assume it is from all the sites they monitor traffic stats for. They seem to be a pay service.

So it seems to depend on the sites being logged and they time of users they attract. The more tech savvy the lower the IE numbers will be."

"There's numerous problems with trying to figure this out.

Usually, the data is collected from what the browser claims to be, and browsers are not always honest. It isn't as much of a problem anymore, but for a while there were quite a few websites that required certain browsers (mostly Internet Explorer) and enforced it with the user-agent field, so a lot of lesser-used browsers are set up to lie about what they are. For this reason, IE will tend to be overreported.

They're also collected from hits, but one hit isn't necessarily one person. Many people do their browsing using caches at some level (perhaps their company, perhaps their ISP), and so one hit on the website with one browser could result in lots of people reading that page on various browsers. The effects of this are probably random, although it may be that certain browsers have a greater tendency to be used behind proxies and caches, and hence are overreported.

There's also the question of who's using the website, since different websites have different demographics. I'd expect Linux websites to get fewer Internet Explorer users, while websites devoted to things like web design will get users who think about their web browser, and don't just use what's convenient, so they'll get more odd browsers and less IE. The average computer user will use what's there, which will normally be IE. Bear in mind that most sites interested in tracking browser types will tend to attract the more computer-literate users, and therefore will probably underreport IE usage."