Re: [tlug] Browser share in Japan?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Martin G writes:

 > > The only thing that matters in open source (and free software, for
 > > that matter) is release rate of the products you use.  Comparing
 > > market share is irrelevant.
 >
 > Doesn't that depend on how you're defining market share?

Not really.  There are two ways to define market share, installed base
and installation rate (number of installations per unit time).  The
former is relevant to complementarities ("lock-in"), the latter to
(direct) revenue (which might be money or, often enough in FLOSS,
bragging rights).  Neither is terribly relevant in open source,
especially given little oddities like the fact that Microsoft's very
popular network stack isn't counted in BSD's statistics....

 > However, I believe the statistics for browsers are usually generated from
 > the user-agent strings received at tested web sites.

Sure, that's useful.  What it isn't, is market share, unless you want
to argue that browser users are in the business of producing accesses,
which websites consume.  (That definition actually doesn't bother me,
but I suspect most of the people you talk to will find it extremely
confusing!)

 > And isn't measuring what people actually use extremely relevant?

Depends.  I couldn't care less what Emacs people actually use.I'm
going to use and work on XEmacs regardless. :-)

Your mileage varies dramatically, as I understand it.  Your income
depends in large part at how good you are at your real job (creating
sites), but you also have to devote substantial time to be bug- and
quirk-compatible with popular bowsers.  You still don't care about
market share, though; you care about which browsers are used to access
your clients' sites.  You can use global figures as a proxy for the
local ones you really care about, of course, but they're likely to be
somewhat bogus.  You don't really care if 90% of the world uses
Android phones if your client has settled on Blackberry for its
intranet sites (assuming you do intranets...).