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Story: Opera: Firefox user figures 'inflated'
Posted by: Chris Smith (Thursday 23 June 2005, 2:03 PM)
This shoulds like a load of FUD to me -- more like something Microsoft would be engaged in than Opera.
If the statistics are based on page impressions, then they're pretty much worthless. If they're based on individual users (like they should be, if the stats company do a half-decent job), then Opera's caching won't affect the count at all.
Download counters and the (vague) number of licenses sold mean nothing. I've downloaded both Firefox and Opera several times on different PCs, yet use Firefox exclusively. With firefox being Free (as in speech, and beer) software, there are no license figures to compare to.
I'll accept that link prefetching may inflate Firefox's results slightly, but according to the stats in the article, Firefox has over 8 times the market share that Opera has. For link prefetching to affect anything, the sites that stats are collected on would need to be ranked in the top couple of results, and the user would have to not click them. I don't know about anyone else, but I normally go to sites that I'm looking for (and google normally does a good job of finding them). In addition to this, Firefox also sends a custom header when requesting prefetched pages, so stats companies could easily filter out these requests and present a proper view.
Full Talkback thread
Story: Opera: Firefox user figures 'inflated'
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Souinds sorta like sour grapes, if you ask me. p!ss artiste -
ahahahahaha ... let'me laughing ...
The guys... jimich -
Most stats providers count 'users' not 'hits' or a... Gids Goldberg
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95% of these 'counters' work by Javascript, n... Cian Duffy
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What a bunch of sour grapes from Opera.
I wrote my... Franki
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Opera Rocks...its fast and doesn't crash or d... Anonymous
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"Don't knock it for the ads -- they are... Thorsten Roggendorf -
Opera is a lame piece of junk, and the whining fro... Mike
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I do use Firefox, a few reasons to that : speed, n... nw
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Opera has excellent features, like mouse gest... howard devore
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Opera and Firefox are neck-and-neck. FIrefox does... Jeff
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Well, I have seen all browsers, like news, BB... Anonymous
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I find it ironic, since I'm reading this through m... spaceghoti
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This shoulds like a load of FUD to me -- more like... Chris Smith -
I feel that the author has put it in the wrong way... Pallab De
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This is something I have suspected for some time.... Al Johnson
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This is a low blow. IE fall guilty of far more mi... Anonymous
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Opera Rules. They invented "tabbed" browsing... Jack
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We're all on the same team here, aren't we? Anythi... Anonymous
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As long as you arn't using IE what's the big... Wade Harper
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Fact: Firefox is downloaded ~250,000 times every d... Amir
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So Opera has some commercials. I don't notice... Anonymous
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Not sure why all of you are knocking IE.... Bob
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With Opera I can restart with all t... Anonymous
