- Mar 30, 2005
- 9,144
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I seriously doubt Chrome browser usage is as prevalent as reports state. Why??
Because whenever you hover over a Google search result and then over the Preview "button" that appears to the right, Google servers (in Mountain View, CA) request a page from that search result's website (on your behalf so you can preview it).
When Google requests - it uses Chrome's User Agent string e.g.
Hence, a site's visitor stats will show it was visited by a Chrome browser when in fact it was merely a Google Web Preview. The question is - Is current web traffic survey software discerning enough?
If not, thanks to this, I'm sure Chrome's market share is inflated beyond belief.
For comparison here's a normal Safari UserAgent string :
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8) AppleWebKit/534.50.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.6 Safari/533.22.3
and here's Chrome's normal UserAgent string :
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2
Because whenever you hover over a Google search result and then over the Preview "button" that appears to the right, Google servers (in Mountain View, CA) request a page from that search result's website (on your behalf so you can preview it).
When Google requests - it uses Chrome's User Agent string e.g.
Hence, a site's visitor stats will show it was visited by a Chrome browser when in fact it was merely a Google Web Preview. The question is - Is current web traffic survey software discerning enough?
If not, thanks to this, I'm sure Chrome's market share is inflated beyond belief.
For comparison here's a normal Safari UserAgent string :
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8) AppleWebKit/534.50.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.6 Safari/533.22.3
and here's Chrome's normal UserAgent string :
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2
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