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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 sp332 on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:04PM (#990231)
Yeah, but then the graph wouldn't look like a Firefox logo :)
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings by drhowarddrfine on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:20PM (#990262)
Yep. This is brilliant!
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:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3328/3421742213_db946c5ddf_o....

Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings by mbrubeck on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:19PM (#990255)
And since the absolute total has grown close to linearly, the tree rings are not that misleading after all.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings by jacoblyles on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:27PM (#990278)
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.

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 jacoblyles on Friday December 11, 2009 @02:54PM (#990322)
You're right, just need to multiply by some scaling factor, as long as the growth stays linear.
Re:The Browser Wars - Visualized as Tree Rings by Dilpil on Friday December 11, 2009 @09:41PM (#991034)
So the way to resolve this would be to calculate the total users for each browser each year, and scale that entire ring outwards.
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.