
The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings - nym
http://www.axiis.org/examples/BrowserMarketShare.html
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jacoblyles
I applaud the authors for attempting a new kind of data visualization.
However, I find two major flaws in the graph:

1) Because the perimeter of a circle grows as a function of the radius, an arc
must grow just to represent the same share. This is misleading, giving an
impression of growth where there is none.

2) It is difficult to tell which arcs on one side of the circle go with arcs
on other parts of the circle. There is simply too much distance between them
to judge accurately which arcs belong to the same time period.

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InclinedPlane
_This is misleading, giving an impression of growth where there is none._

But there is growth. Perhaps it's the static percentage based graph that's
misleading, I find this graph of more or less the same data rather intriguing:

[http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3328/3421742213_db946c5ddf_o....](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3328/3421742213_db946c5ddf_o.png)

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jacoblyles
Is the market really growing by 2 x PI x the width of one of their slices?
That would be quite the coincidence.

Your link is much easier to read.

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Periodic
The market doesn't have to grow by 2 * PI anything. It's just a constant.
Since the radius grows linearly, you can map any linearly growing series of
data and you'll find it looks good in this presentation format.

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jacoblyles
You're right, just need to multiply by some scaling factor, as long as the
growth stays linear.

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Dilpil
So the way to resolve this would be to calculate the total users for each
browser each year, and scale that entire ring outwards.

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aristus
This graph does not repeat _not_ show global browser market share. It is for
traffic to the w3.org website. Any comparisons to global browser trends (PI*2
growth, etc) or "wars" is not meaningful.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers>

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butterfi
Interesting! The title is a bit vague for me -- when I think browser wars, I
think of the mid 90's. This graph kind of picks up in the middle of story.
It's like skipping "The Fellowship of the Ring" and going straight to "The Two
Towers."

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sosuke
Why don't these graphs ever break down into the major versions of Firefox? I
know there is still testing done on 1.5, 2.x and then of course 3.x as the
current version. Why break down IE, Opera and Netscape but not Firefox or
Safari?

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maukdaddy
Because it makes the Firefox share look larger.

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ErrantX
It will be interesting to see if Chrome retains it's growth.

Also an nice reminder of how fast Mozilla/Firefox grew initially as well - I
thought Chrome was exploding on the scene and had forgotten how fast FF took a
decent market share. A neat reminder not to wear rose tinted specs.

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bradgessler
Very cool; however if you look at the graph is seems like Firefox is the
dominant browser because they did not seperate our the versions of Firefox (or
not show versions of IE)

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est
Best demoed with Axiis :)

But I found a 404 in the examples page:

<http://www.axiis.org/examples/HClusterColumnExamplee.html>

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fnid
This is actually just a sample for an open source visualization library. Look
through the other samples. They are interesting. Wish it wasn't flash, but
still nice nonetheless.

<http://www.axiis.org/examples.html>

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ez77
Firefox has a 47.4% marketshare as of August 2009??? Does anybody know what
sources were used? It would be nice to see the same graph but this time with
real data...

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selven
It's about which websites you're checking. On, say, cnn.com you might get a
more IE-centric audience. On places like Slashdot, Linux would have a higher
market share than IE. It's extremely difficult to make an accurate census of
who is using what on their computers.

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gaborcselle
Chrome has 7% market share? I'm a Chrome user myself but that number is much
higher than I expected. What's the source for growth? (those YouTube videos
maybe?)

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NikkiA
Doesn't surprise me at all, Google has the advantage that MS has - 'Brand
Awareness' - Joe Q Public sees Firefox and sees a brand with no trust backing,
unless they've already been preached to by a geek friend, but they see 'Google
Chrome' and know that they trust Google/YouTube.

It doesn't really help firefox that many of us geeks are switching to
Chrome|Chromium|Iron for various reasons, too.

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DanBlake
Smells like bullshit. Firefox doesnt have more usage than IE. Must be traffic
to one website, not global usage.

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elblanco
It's cool, but probably would have worked better laid out in a stacked bar
chart with x being the time axis.

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johnl
Neat. They should add a 3rd dimension with market size as ring size.

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waleedka
Does that image look like the Chrome logo, or it just me? :)

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timwiseman
I thought it looked a lot like the Firefox logo. I suspect it is like a
Rorshach test and the resemblances we find say more about use than the image.

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madh
I would have liked to see it start earlier, say 1997 or so.

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yason
Coincidentally, it looks quite like Firefox's logo to me ;)

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wensing
Can't wait until IE9, IE10, IE11 ...

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Raphael
Don't hold your breath.

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gcb
what happened in early 2008?

the empty space, which i believe is "other browsers" grow a lot then.

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misuba
not quite as much as it did in 2006, but yeah. anyone have memories of what
was going on in extremely-alternative browsers around these times?

