

Web browser market share of all times visualized - durman
http://figurepool.com/figure/view/Web_browser_market_share_of_all_times-7774b3b7f5ceba1d47fac95f540c2bb4.html

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ghshephard
Breathtaking, particularly for those of us who lived, fought (and lost) in the
Browser Wars of 1996-1998.

I can remember Jim Barksdale, (A southern gentleman, and our beloved CEO) -
frequently made references to William Barksdale (Confederate General) - and
urged Netscape on to fight, always reminding us, that win or lose, we'd never
forget that we fought in the browser wars.

This web page of browser growth history (for all it's probable flaws) is very
heartwarming.

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cinfinity
This is not a "visualization".

It would be far better to do line plots of each browser's market share as a
function of time, distinguishing different browsers by color.

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hmbg
Half-agreed. A stacked area chart would be perfect for this.

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mxfh
I would take pretty much anything with a temporal axis over these pie-charts.
Also I would favor stacked bars with optional trend lines over area charts in
the case of countable annual data like this.

After which amount of data points is it considered recommended to switch to
interpolated line/area charts?

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franze
i have been in web development sind 1998, and the worst time was 2004 to 2006.
whereby 2002 and even 2003 IE 6 was seen as fresh air in the internet (oh, the
things you could do), in 2004 the cracks and horrible limitations began to
show, and no new version, no better browser, no better internet in sight
(mozilla firebird still sucked at that time), 2006 was my personal year of
browser depression, and i decided i don't want to code for a living anymore
(quit my job, started my first business).

browser share wise, yes, 2012 really is/was the greatest year ever.

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rimantas
I agree with the first half, but regarding Mozilla… IIRC I switched to version
0.6 (then called Phoenix, iirc) as my default browser in 2003, and I don't
remember it sucking. I remember still coding for IE5 compatibility in 2006,
but it was not a problem. For me IE7 was more annoying, strangely enough.

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franze
IE 7 was annoying as you had to deal with IE 6 and IE 7 now. so instead of one
problem, you now had 2 * the problem variations due to the different
rendering-modes...

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rimantas
Yeah, IE6 was a known enemy and not really surprising, IE7 bugs seemed weird
and erratic in comparison.

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monsterix
Brings us to a question in near term. What will Microsoft attempt to do next
(other than developing IE10/IE11) to retain their browser market-share?

This? [http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-
Mozillas-...](http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozillas-
Firefox)

[Update & disclaimer: The page links to a question on Quora which is behind a
sign-up overlay for non-users by Quora. I do not work for Quora.]

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franze
had to downvote, as you linked to a page that is unreadable thx to a blur-
overlay for not logged in users.

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monsterix
Oh I didn't realize because I was logged in. But then that overlay is out of
my control no?

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franze
but the page you link to isn't

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monsterix
Absolutely. I accept your down-vote for poor (possibly) experience off Quora.

The question regarding browser market-share and its impact on Microsoft's
positioning is relevant to the context of this thread so it makes sense to
quote here.

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pkorzeniewski
I can't decide if it's a success that Opera is still on the market, or a
failure that after 10 years they still have so minor share. Sure, 1.71% is a
lot of users given the size of market, but if you look at the charts they had
0.78% in 2002 so they gained 1% in 10 years.. I don't get it, couldn't they
find a way to interest more people in such long time?

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franze
if a company is still active after 10 years, earns good money, employes a lot
of people and still manages to build good and valuable products, then they are
- in my point of view - an impressive success-story.

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btipling
What happened between 1998 and 1999 that flipped the percentage so
dramatically in favor of IE? Was it all the new people joining the internet
for the first time who simply clicked the blue e instead of installing
netscape or did people abandon netscape in droves?

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ghshephard
Microsoft included it for free with their (at that time monopoly market share)
operating system. Entire Divisions of Netscape were terminated when that
happened.

It may be hard for people to imagine now, but back in 1996/1997, selling
browser software was like selling spreadsheet or word processing software.
People paid $50+/copy for their browser. It was a threat to Microsoft
(potential alternative application platform) - so they eliminated it (Cut off
Netscape's Air supply) - by giving the browser away for free with their
operating system - and, because everyone (for most reasonable definitions of
everyone) was running Microsoft's operating system on their desktop, there was
no longer any need to buy it from Netscape.

It probably didn't help that, by 1998, the Netscape client had a pretty
significant technical debt, was no longer a nimble browser, and, if I recall
correctly, had been rebranded as "Netscape Communicator" and had all this
crufty email/calendar/editing software slapped onto it. If all you wanted was
a browser, Netscape was not necessarily the goto product anymore. Even simple
things like rendering large tables could freeze up the browser. And it
crashed. A lot.

This was before people realized how valuable controlling the search
engine/first hop to the Internet would be.

Netscape (Mike Homer?) finally realized that, with it's dying breath, the most
valuable asset it had wasn't all the Enterprise Software (Directory Servers,
Certificate Servers, Enterprise Web Server, Application Servers, Business
Servers) - but, Ironically, "www.netscape.com" - sold to AOL for $4Billion
(much of the software being split between AOL and Sun in the ill fated iPlanet
experiment) - and, on the last day of trading, was worth $10 Billion (mostly
due to to a rise in the stock value of AOL - the deal's value was heavily
related to the AOL stock price)

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melling
"At that time monopoly market share (operating system)"

What do you think Microsoft has now? Microsoft isn't quite as lethal at this
time, but in all honesty, they still dominate. It's funny to see people
complain about Google's 70% search monopoly and Apple's 20-25% iOS walled
garden, but 9/10 of the people in the world buy PC's with Microsoft Windows.

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ghshephard
Agreed that most people still have a Windows OS in front of them. But the wild
card on the upswing now is mobile - which Microsoft has very little strength
in.

Also, web applications provide real diversity of application experience beyond
the Windows OS. For a lot of people, applications like email, twitter, photo-
sharing, game playing, social networking etc.. are no longer tied to a
particular desktop client operating system. Indeed, Social Networking, where
people spend enormous amounts of time, is an example where I would say the
Desktop OS is as irrelevant as your BIOS.

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MojoJolo
Can someone enlighten me. What happened in 1995 that let Netscape to grab the
majority of the market share that Mozaic has in the past year (1994)? I was
still a child at that time and I'm curious what happen.

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jah
Threaded page loading. Mosaic needed to download all text and graphics before
displaying any part of a web page. This was painfully slow over modems.
Netscape's huge innovation was to partially render pages while resources
(mainly images) were downloading, giving the appearance of a faster web.

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mseepgood
The market looks healthy at the moment.

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franze
as someone who went to more than one browser war i have to say: as long as
there is still some blue in that chart, it's not over. and yes, i'm strongly
biased. i would be years younger if ms would give me back the time i wasted
with IE bugs/features/rendering/special-needs or whatever they call it.

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brazzy
> as long as there is still some blue in that chart, it's not over.

And that's a good thing. It would be best if it's never "over", because the
only way for that to happen would be complete and unchangeable dominance of
one browser, which would cause exactly the problems we don't want.

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Drakim
One browser should not dominate if the market is to stay healthly. I wish
Opera would grow some in share, perhaps even Safari. But that blue needs to be
GONE.

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netcan
The current (2012) pie chart seems to be very close to ideal for pushing
everything forward.

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junto
That first pie chart (2012 - Race to HTML5) looks damn healthy and just where
we want to be. I.e. No outright monopoly by any player.

