NetMarketShare Ends Browser War Reports Due To Google Chrome Changes

NetMarketShare announced on Sunday plans to shut down its public browser share reporting tool, which has been available for more than 14 years.

Net Applications, the owners of NetMarketShare, is widely known for being a provider of usage share statistics for web browsers and operating systems. According to Net Applications, the data provided by NetMarketShare is a primary source in “tens of thousands of articles and publication”.

The NetMarketShare website is still active, but starting November 1, Net Application says that it is “retiring NetMarketShare in its current form” and no new monthly stats will be released going forward.

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NetMarketShare is sunsetting the service because of a recent change proposed by Google. On its website, the company stated that Google’s proposed “User Agent Client Hints” will break NetMarketShare’s device detection technology and it will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time.

Earlier this year, Google announced that it wants to freeze the User-Agent and switch to Client Hints.

Google stated that moving Chrome to a new system will reduce the complexity of updating User-Agent strings and improve the privacy of users.

For those unaware, User Agent is a string that is used to find out information about your browser and operating system for statistical purpose. When you visit a website, a browser sends a user User Agent string to the website’s server that is basically used by online publishers to identify the name of the browser, version, and the operating system.

User Agent strings are also used by web sites to identify information about their visitors and offer a personalized or limited experience to certain web browsers.

In its proposal, Google recommends deprecating the “User Agent” as the strings are a privacy risk and commonly used by fingerprinter scripts to track users.

Instead of accepting increasing levels of inaccuracy, Net Applications has decided to retire NetMarketShare in its current form.

“In addition, we have focused on bot detection and removal as a key part of the quality control process. It is the most complex part of our codebase. As time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to manage this process. So, instead of accepting increasing levels of inaccuracy, we thought it would be a good time to call it a day,” the company stated.

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Net Applications has promised that NetMarketShare will re-emerge at some point with a focus on ecommerce trends and verifiable user data, but for now, no new data will be released and October 2020 stats are the final numbers.

BleepingComputer has contacted StatsCounter, a similar service as NetMarketShare, to see if they would be impacted by these changes.