Opera’s CEO made some statements in this ZDNet article claiming that the percentage of Firefox users is inflated due to the prefetching support in Mozilla Firefox.
In the article, James Governor, who is an analyst at RedMonk, backed up the statement saying the numbers can be inaccurate. He also went on to say that so are the “download” numbers. This is something that I and others have been saying for a while.
Sure spreadfirefox.com reports 65M downloads of Firefox, and Opera’s website says there have been several million downloads of Opera 8.0. That’s great, but how many of those millions of people who downloaded the software are still using the programs?
One of my issues with spreadfirefox.com is the counter tracks how many people click on the referral link, which doesn’t necessarily mean they even downloaded the software. I’d assume Opera’s tracking system is similar.
Stats are inflated and misrepresented all the time. Who cares? As long as the market share is being taken away from IE, it’s all good.