Google's Chrome drops share for second straight month

Computerworld - The browser battle returned to a kind of normalcy last month as Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which had posted its largest-ever share increase in January, declined slightly in February.

And Google's Chrome fell for the second straight month in Web metrics firm Net Application's statistics as the company acknowledged it has been over-counting that browser's share for months.

Chrome's pre-rendering feature -- where the browser loads pages in the background that the user may view -- kicked off last August with version 13, and was enhanced in Chrome 17 that launched about a month ago.

As users type in search strings. whether at Google.com or in the browser's combined address bar/search field, dubbed the "omnibox," Google loads one or more hidden pages that it thinks the user will select from the ensuing search links.

Net Applications admitted that it had given Chrome a larger share than the browser deserved. "[Pre-rendering] creates unviewed visits that should not be counted in Chrome's usage share," said Net Applications on its website yesterday.

Starting with the data from February, Net Applications has adjusted Chrome's share -- which is derived from the page views attributed to the browser -- by tossing aside unused pre-loaded pages and counting only those the user actually sees.

"Pre-rendering in February 2012 accounted for 4.3% of Chrome's daily unique visitors," said Net Applications.

Chrome is the only major browser that offers pre-rendering.

Under the new methodology, Chrome's share fell about one half of a percentage point to end February with 18.9%, off its peak of 19.1% last December. The browser remained in the No. 3 slot, behind both IE and Mozilla's Firefox.

Last month, Net Applications linked Chrome's decline to Google's January decision to demote the PageRank -- a rating Google assigns based on how many other sites link to a URL -- for Chrome's download site after it confirmed a marketing campaign had violated the company's own rules against paid links.

At the time, Google said it would punish its own browser with a 60-day PageRank demotion; the time-out ends in a few days, after which Google will presumably restore the download page's prominence in search results for "browser."