NetMarketShare announced on Sunday that it plans to shut down its public browser benchmarking tool, which has been available for more than 14 years.
Net Applications, the owners of NetMarketShare, are widely known as providers of web browser and operating system usage share statistics. According to Net Applications, the data provided by NetMarketShare is the primary source of tens of thousands of articles.
The NetMarketShare website is still active, but as of November 1, Net Application says it is “retiring NetMarketShare in its current form” and no new monthly statistics will be released.
NetMarketShare is shutting down its service due to a recent change proposed by Google. On its website, the company stated that Google's proposed "User Agent Client Hints" would break NetMarketShare's device detection technology and cause inaccuracies for a long time.
Earlier this year, Google announced that it wants to freeze User-Agent and switch to Client Hints.
Google said that moving Chrome to a new system will reduce the complexity of updating User- Agent strings and improve user privacy .
For those who don't know, User Agent is a string used to find information about your browser and operating system for statistical purposes. When you visit a website, a browser sends a User Agent string to the website's server which is basically used by online publishers to identify your browser name, version , and operating system.
"User Agent strings" are also used by websites to identify information about visitors and offer a personalized or limited experience in some web browsers.
In its proposal, Google recommends removing the “User Agent” as strings pose a privacy risk and are commonly used by “fingerprinter scripts” to track users.
Rather than accept increasing levels of inaccuracy, Net Applications decided to retire NetMarketShare in its current form .
Net Applications promised that NetMarketShare would reappear at some point with a focus on “ecommerce trends” and verifiable user data, but for now, no new data and statistics will be released – October 2020 is the last statistics released.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
