Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by jacoblyles on Friday December 11, 2009 @01:58PM
(#990217)
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.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by InclinedPlane on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:08PM
(#990234)
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:
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by Periodic on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:49PM
(#990310)
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.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by iamwil on Friday December 11, 2009 @03:12PM
(#990358)
Not only that, but the dataset doesn't have even time spacing. In the earlier years, it skipped a couple months, and only recently did it start to do every month.
However, that's not reflected in the visualization, and we're lead to believe that this is sampled with even steps over time.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by maudineormsby on Friday December 11, 2009 @03:09PM
(#990352)
Keep in mind that this is a tech demo used to show a visualization of someone else's data (W3C in this case). So the author likely cared a lot more for visual appear and demonstrating functionality than for the way the graph might be interpreted.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by Periodic on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:51PM
(#990316)
The growth of the size of an arc is only misleading because the graph naturally draws you to compare different browsers as a percentage of the market.
Since the market has grown basically linearly, the arcs may actually be in direct proportion to the actual number of users, in which case there is very real growth.
The confusion comes when you see growth of absolute terms when the more interesting statistic is what the relative growth is.
Particularly, if one browser's arc remained the same size on each ring you might assume that it is staying the same. It has the same number of users, but it is losing prominence.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by jasford on Friday December 11, 2009 @05:54PM
(#990705)
Then again, the number of users on the Internet has grown every year, so even if a browser just held its % market share steady, that would mean an increase in quantity of users.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by aristus on Friday December 11, 2009 @03:10PM
(#990354)
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.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by butterfi on Friday December 11, 2009 @05:19PM
(#990645)
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."
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by sosuke on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:16PM
(#990251)
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?
Note that this is from w3schools.com, not w3.org (a completely different site). This is for a web developer audience, so it kind of makes sense; from a developer point of view there are much bigger differences in standards compliance between IE versions than between Firefox versions. But mostly they just seem to want to keep a small number of columns on that page.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by ErrantX on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:34PM
(#990287)
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.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by bradgessler on Friday December 11, 2009 @04:00PM
(#990453)
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)
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by fnid on Friday December 11, 2009 @03:55PM
(#990445)
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.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by ez77 on Friday December 11, 2009 @07:27PM
(#990878)
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...
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by selven on Saturday December 12, 2009 @08:38AM
(#991502)
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.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by gaborcselle on Friday December 11, 2009 @04:32PM
(#990552)
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?)
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings
by NikkiA on Saturday December 12, 2009 @08:12AM
(#991483)
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.
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.
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....
Your link is much easier to read.
However, that's not reflected in the visualization, and we're lead to believe that this is sampled with even steps over time.
Since the market has grown basically linearly, the arcs may actually be in direct proportion to the actual number of users, in which case there is very real growth.
The confusion comes when you see growth of absolute terms when the more interesting statistic is what the relative growth is.
Particularly, if one browser's arc remained the same size on each ring you might assume that it is staying the same. It has the same number of users, but it is losing prominence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Note that this is from w3schools.com, not w3.org (a completely different site). This is for a web developer audience, so it kind of makes sense; from a developer point of view there are much bigger differences in standards compliance between IE versions than between Firefox versions. But mostly they just seem to want to keep a small number of columns on that page.
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.
But I found a 404 in the examples page:
http://www.axiis.org/examples/HClusterColumnExamplee.html
http://www.axiis.org/examples.html
It doesn't really help firefox that many of us geeks are switching to Chrome|Chromium|Iron for various reasons, too.
the empty space, which i believe is "other browsers" grow a lot then.