I guess I was too vague and you misunderstood what I was trying to say.

Your point about Chrome's prerendering convinced me: Chrome using such a  technique should at least partly explain a higher market share when market share is estimated based on page views.

But that only explains the huge difference between the two Chrome numbers. Assuming that the other browsers don't use this technique, it doesn't explain why the difference in Internet Explorer market share numbers is so huge in the two statistics, while the numbers for the other browsers (which are also not using prefetching/prerendering) are rather close between the two statistics.

I personally assume that this is because infrequent/casual internet users (like elderly people) are mainly using Internet Explorer. These people spend few time browsing the internet anyway, so why should they concern about downloading and installing a different internet browser if IE is already installed and works fine for everything they're doing?

You're assuming that its a binary type of thing, the crowd in here prefers Chrome and FF, vs an audience that hardly ever uses computers (elderly). Most people are a happy medium and based on the results are apparantly happy with IE as that is what they were first exposed to and prefer familiarity and all, this however is slowly changing.

firefox > IE > Chrome

IMO

using Palemoon(a version of FF) and Maxthon

i'd use ie if it had better plugin support