5 ms·
Web browser market share of all times visualized
- MojoJolo 14y agoCan 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.
- mtgx 14y agoI assume because there were few PC's at first, and then a PC explosion happened with Windows 95, and Netscape signed a deal with most of the new ones to include their browser (which made their share grow much faster than Mosaic's). Then Microsoft introduced Windows 98 with IE in it, and killed that Netscape market.
- ghshephard 14y agoMarc Andreessen, headed out west. Brought most of the Urbana-Champaign (key) Mosaic Brain Share with him (or recruited people like Eric Bina to work on the project). Jim Clark sunk a ton of dough into the project - and they worked hard at making it successful. Mosaic was then Licensed to Microsoft (and some other companies, but Microsoft made the most of it) and became the heart of IE. There was no "Mosaic" left to be Mosaic after that.
- jah 14y agoThreaded 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.
- ghshephard 14y agoBreathtaking, 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.
- btipling 14y agoWhat 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?
- franze 14y agowindows 98 happened
- ghshephard 14y agoMicrosoft 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)
- 14y ago
- franze 14y agoi 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.
- rimantas 14y agoI 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.
- mseepgood 14y agoThe market looks healthy at the moment.
- franze 14y agoas 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.
- brazzy 14y ago> 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.
- Drakim 14y agoOne 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.
- monsterix 14y agoBrings 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-Firefox http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozillas-... [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.]
- cinfinity 14y agoThis 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.
- hammondos 14y agoAgreed - a bunch of pie charts (not great communicating info at the best of times) could hardly be called a "visualization" in the modern sense of creating a graphic that makes data easily understandable, visually appealing & useful
- hmbg 14y agoHalf-agreed. A stacked area chart would be perfect for this.
- mxfh 14y agoI 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?
- netcan 14y agoThe current (2012) pie chart seems to be very close to ideal for pushing everything forward.
- pkorzeniewski 14y agoI 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?
- junto 14y agoThat 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.