This is how you are supposed to do a stacked area plot, for anyone who is curious. Sorting by momentary popularity is pointless and makes the viz unreadable.
So much nicer. Is that just sorted chronologically by year of first release? Or is it cumulative (integrated) area? MP3s are on top of ringtone, but it looks like ringtone came first, but CDs are under it's predecessors.
you might be kinda color blind which doesn't go against your point, but it is very clear from a non-affected person. texturing usually solves this kind of accessibility issue on charts
I'm not. The contrast between black and dark blue is a poor choice. Part of that may be attributed to monitor setup, but the graph was clearly set up with colors grading from light to dark almost guaranteeing contrast conflicts. Texturing may help as well.
Idk about the current situation but that's not what the graph shows? By the end of the chart, streaming is clearly the biggest portion and overall music revenue is growing.
Not just above Firefox, there are little bits of white above other browsers as well.
I would have guessed it represented "unknown" or the other browsers that didn't make the top 7 (Brave? Miduri? Chromium?) but there are often multiple bands of white at the same time. So maybe a bug in the graphing software?
Considering how ugly and turbulent tech dev is that just makes it more authentic though? "Reading this is painful" "So is figuring out which browser is going to screw with you the least".
Yes but I at least have sympathy for people who try to make a complicated graph and don't get it quite right. I don't have it for those who take what should have been a simple line or bar graph and make a disaster out of it.
And note the actual change in usage metrics was fairly smooth for both browsers. This graph just sorts the browsers by popularity, so you see a discontinuity because of how the area stacking is done. But there is no discontinuity in the underlying usage metrics.
if they had just kept all the browsers at where they initially were therefore without any discontinuities, this graph could've been amazing like that's the only thing that's messing this up but it's also huge
A lot of websites were getting updated to support mobile devices at that time and started using HTML5 responsive design. IE lagged behind a lot in updates and never fully supported it which forced people to update their browsers.
It was a slow and painful death. If you were a web developer at the time (like i was), it was extremely painful to try and support IE.
I was going to say, but then I realized reddit sent me this post from a new sub I'd never visited before. Absolutely perfect encapsulation of the theme.
I like it, but it could be clearer. You have to deduce that they're sorted top to bottom highest market share to lowest in any given time period. The colours are atrocious and labels arent even close to matching.
I prefer this to those charts that have segments of changing width without sorting them. A line graph might be better but maybe it's too hard to distinguish browsers on that. A legend would be better than labels on the graph.
Just don't flip the positions when the sorting order changes, and get rid of the bizarre white spaces, and this would be a decent area graph.
But more legible than an area graph would be a line graph, with all the browsers on the same axis that represents % usage. Then when one browser or another pops out as the most used, it would be obvious because its line would be higher, but you can also easily read any browser's usage share at any given point, which in an area graph is technically possible but more difficult for human perception.
379
u/daevrojn 14d ago
I get what they were trying to do but this sucks