...suggests that IE 8, 9 and 10 combined have about ~28% market share. Of course, I don't know what they're measuring --- somewhere like github is going to see a very different balance of browsers than, say, Amazon --- but that's a hell of a lot, roughly equal to the IE 11 market share. I'd say that's way too much to dismiss out of hand.
That suggestions that netmarketshare are consistently measuring IE high --- other people show IE at about half that, and Chrome at about double what netmarketshare do. Which, of course, makes it even more important to find out who your audience are before giving up support for old browsers.
> That suggestions that netmarketshare are consistently measuring IE high
That's because those tables arae
StatCounter (and the W3Counter/Wikimedia things in the tables you cite) are measuring website visits.
NetApplications/netmarketshare is measuring unique users.
So what that data shows is likely several things going on at once:
1) Chrome (and Firefox, for that matter, if you look at te the tables)) users load more webpages than IE users.
2) Chrome does some webpage prerendering stuff that can get counted as "visits" if you're not very careful; not sure how well StatCounter accounts for this.
3) Likely some differences in the actual base data, though I expect this is really minor compared to item #1.
Of course I couldn't agree more with your general claim that web-wide statistics are a poor replacement for specific statistics for a particular site. But even there the question of "visits" vs "unique users" might be an important one.
Self-replying, since I have no idea what happened to the comment text I _meant_ to write and I can't edit it now. What I meant to say at the beginning of my comment was:
That's because those tables are comparing apples and oranges. StatCounter (and the W3Counter/Wikimedia things in the tables you cite) are measuring website visits. NetApplications/netmarketshare is measuring unique users.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...
...suggests that IE 8, 9 and 10 combined have about ~28% market share. Of course, I don't know what they're measuring --- somewhere like github is going to see a very different balance of browsers than, say, Amazon --- but that's a hell of a lot, roughly equal to the IE 11 market share. I'd say that's way too much to dismiss out of hand.
Edit: I've since found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
That suggestions that netmarketshare are consistently measuring IE high --- other people show IE at about half that, and Chrome at about double what netmarketshare do. Which, of course, makes it even more important to find out who your audience are before giving up support for old browsers.