NetMarketShare announced on Sunday that it plans to stop public reporting on the programs tours, which have been circulating for more than 14 years.
Net Applications, the owner of the NetMarketShare service, is known as a provider of usage statistics for Web browsers, operating systems and applications. According to Net Applications, the data provided by NetMarketShare is the source for "tens of thousands of articles and publications".
The NetMarketShare website is still active, but as of November 1, Net Application reports that "NetMarketShare has stopped working in its current form" and no new monthly statistics will be released.
The NetMarketShare service is shutting down due to a recent changes suggested by Google. NetMarketShare reported that Google's “User Agent Client Hints” feature will no longer help with detection devices and will cause inaccuracies.
Earlier this year, Google announced that it wanted to freeze User-Agent.
Google has said that moving Chrome to a new system will reduce the complexity of the User-Agent feature and improve user privacy.
For those unfamiliar with it, User Agent is a feature used to find information about your browser and operating system for statistical purposes. When you visit a page, your browser sends User Agent information to the page server. This feature is used by web publishers to identify browser name, version, and operating system.
The User Agent feature is also used by websites to serve a personalized or limited experience in some Web browsers.
In its proposal, Google recommends removing the “User Agent” as the feature is a privacy risk and is commonly used by fingerprinter scripts to monitoring of users.
So instead of providing inaccurate information, Net Applications decided to withdraw NetMarketShare in its current form.
Net Applications has promised that NetMarketShare will reappear at some point, but for now, no new data or statistics will be released. The latest to appear are the October 2020 statistics.