Statcounter measures the amount of browsing, not unique people.

Netmarketshare attempts to measure the latter and shows IE on top.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...

So it depends on what your definition of "popular browser" is. Is it the browser that's used by most people? That would be IE. Is it the browser that most browsing happens? That would be Chrome. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that both Statcounter and Netmarketshare are not perfect and don't cover all or even most sites' logs.

As others have noted, W3schools only measures hits to the W3Schools site, which is not even close to be being representative of the web.