Another observation is that the Web has about doubled in size since Safari and Firefox came on the scene and since that time, Firefox has captured almost half of that growth.

- A

awesome visualization!

So, the number of overall users has consistently gone up by about 100,000,000 a year since 1998. Given that growth is not slowing substantially, there appears to be much to look forward to in the next decade!

Aaron, yeah. I think that's one of the more exciting things I take away from this visualization. The Web is still growing really really fast. It also demonstrates how quickly a dominant player can fall, not from users switching, but from growth alone.

This is part of what makes Microsoft's desktop monopoly and its lock on the PC OEM channel so dangerous and potent a weapon. Even if they don't get people to switch, just owning the first experience is worth about 100 million new users a year.

- A

"The first thing that really jumps out at me is that Netscape, for all its early success, was used by relatively few people. The pie was just a lot smaller at the end of the last century."

Yes, it's interesting. I actually blogged about that a while ago http://djst.org/blog/2007/12/30/firefox-stronger-brand-than-netscape-ever-was/

I think you've got an extra 0 in there for the top two numbers of internet users? Or are you saying we have 12 billion people on the net now?

H, oops. I did indeed have an extra couple of zeros in there. Thanks for the catch.

- A

Where are the mozilla (pre firefox ) versions on your graph ? (ie when Netscape code was open sourced, Mozilla Mxx, Mozilla 1.0, .....Mozilla 1.x....)
Are they mixed with Netscape or Firefox numbers ?
(ie to reflect the few people having done Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox, which should be the case for most Mozilla people...)

Thanks for this Asa. Could you extend the graph back to 1994 so that this data could be included http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#1998_and_earlier ? Seeing the transition from Mosaic to Netscape would be interesting. You would probably either have to extend the scale vertically or produce a separate graph going up to 1996.

This is a similar kind of graph but for layout engines and done on percentages rather than absolute numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Layout_engine_usage_share.svg

Also, as matp75 said, explaining where Mozilla fits in would be helpful.

matp75 and Dan, the Mozilla 1.x series never had more than a couple million users. It was too small to include on this graph.

- A

I'd be interested if you could allude to what statistical sources you were primarily using for total number of people using a WWW browser.

Obviously like all figures here, there's a large amount of error, but yes it is visually striking and I think the main point of the graph is likely to be true even with all the potential error.

Nice work indeed. Splitting IE versions would also be interesting.

Fantastic chart! Would you (pretty please) put a new one up with corrected numbers? We're at roughly 1.2B users in total, right? I've even seen as high as 1.6B.

Would you mind terribly if I use it in a Research Paper for my Master's degree? I'm studying to be a librarian and I need a good browser statistic - yours is wonderfully done.

You should copyright it with creative commons by the way!

thanks again!

Chad, sure, feel free to use the chart. It's CC attribution.

I don't believe the 1.6B figure. I've seen estimates from 1B to 1.6B but after considering a half dozen sources, I think that 1.2 to 1.3B is most likely closest to the truth.

I don't think that the chart is going to get more accurate than it currently is without more data sources.

- A

I think it would also be useful to merge Netscape and Firefox into a single group because I don't think together they ever dropped below 5% overall. Another interesting version would be to split them all by version. But a very interesting chart indeed.

Excellent work! I plan on using this chart in one of my upcoming lectures for my intermediate web class.

I would also like to see the breakdown of the various IE versions. Seeing how IE7 was adopted v. IE6 would be an excellent way to illustrate to potential clients how important standards-based coding is moving forward (yes I still hear clients ask for IE-only sites).

Nice visualization!

But the way the data is laid out implies that the growth of Firefox is primarily due to new web users starting off with Firefox. I'd wager that's not really the case, though: Firefox is more like a disruptive technology that takes market share away from the existing dominant player. If we grossly simplify things: new users tend to use whatever came with their computer, while people who have used the web for a while tend to switch to Firefox.

I think that moving Firefox to the bottom of your chart would help illustrate that.

The "other" category isn't quite as obvious: Opera users certainly deserve to be depicted at the bottom of the chart with Firefox, eating away at the IE market share. But Safari users? They too are just using what came with their computer, though perhaps they "switched" from a PC…

Asa - thanks for putting this together and posting it, as well as for licensing it via CC. This sort of data is a big help to me, and very interesting as we think about where this growth is headed.

I think it's awesome, what do you think about creating an online tool that generates on the fly such a visualizations?

What about Chrome, isn't it a blip on the screen yet? Historical note: I have used PCs since their inception, switched away from IE as soon as Firefox was released, had been using IE based alternative (tabbed!) browsers (ie, Avant, et al) well before that switch, and that I currently use four different browsers dependant upon what I am doing: Firefox for development, Chrome for Gmail/Analytics (google stuff...), Safari for basic (faster) everyday surfing, and Opera for some alternative development activities and research. Lastly, I only fire up IE to see how my websites look like and to do MS updates. Footnote: I would likely be using Firefox a lot more but it has taken to intermittently stalling for minutes at a time, and I have wasted hours and hours trying differing "solutions" and just stopped messing with it...

Jeb, Chrome is included in "other" but it's not measurable at this scale yet.

If you're having problems with Firefox, I'd recommend deleting your profile and re-importing settings from your primary browser. Firefox shouldn't be stalling and I expect something has gotten corrupted in your profile.

- A

The best part of that graph is the IE usage flatlining. Hopefully it won't take another 10 years to undo its damage.

I think it'd be interesting to see it split by major version of each browser too.

Asa - could you change the copyright notice on your Flickr account to make it clear that this is under a CC license? Right now it says "all rights reserved."

also interesting Asa is that when the netscape/IE ration was about 66%/33%) netscape was "crushed.

Now lets get Firefox there, so IE usage will follow the curve of netscape, the web (like life) comes in waves it seems...

Thank you again Asa! Your work is attributed in my paper. :)

For all of us web developers out there, this means that IE still remains one of the biggest installations of browsers and therefore should not be ignored, especially the anti microsoft geeks.

I wont be surprised if the IE trend will change in the next couple of years once Windows 7 will ship.

It's sort of neat to see how the tail of Netscape ends near the emergence of Firefox for historical reasons.
I'd also like to see what segment of those browsers are on mobile devices - namely, how will the mobile versions of Opera, Safari, Firefox stack up against IE on Windows Mobile?

Worthless visualization.

the left side presimes "other" are top on.
also not possible to compare the size or volume of users since this i stacked together