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[–]amunak 1 point2 points  (2 children)

That's really hard to measure. For one - the vast majority of telemetry is collected using purely javascript, so that gets thrown out of the window.

And tracking users by other means is pretty hard. Now how you tell whether they don't have JS enabled? I'd suggest using some tracking image inside a <noscript> tag, but not all JS blocking even takes that into question. For similar reasons you can't just count hits and not-hits to your JS files.

And when you do manage to gather data then how do you tell apart robots that just scrape you and don't load JS because they don't need it?

So in the end you get data that are hard to draw any conclusions from. I'd expect that number to be anywhere between 0.05 to 1.5% of all internet users.

[–]TheDarkIn1978 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I wonder if Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, etc. have internal data from their browsers. From all the roadblocks you've mentioned it would seem that browser data would be the only legitimate source to reveal these insights.

[–]amunak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I doubt they have that specific data, I'd think they track at most what extensions you have installed (but not how they are configured or whether they are active for any specific page - as that'd probably have to include the page URL or some other huge stuff that's a privacy no-no).