Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

According to Google search traffic, React is 10x popular:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

According to NPM download stats, React is 6x larger:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react https://www.npmjs.com/package/vue

For Vue to catch up to the number of React stars would mean that their rate of starring is significantly higher.

I wonder if rate of new Github stars are a leading indicator of future popularity increases? Probably? Would be interesting if someone could study that.

Weird thing, commits to Vue are decreasing over time and are mainly done by a single individual - I've never seen that pattern in a popular library: https://github.com/vuejs/vue/graphs/contributors

While commits to React are regular and come from a much wider base of contributors: https://github.com/facebook/react/graphs/contributors

The writing is clearly on the wall (or the stars are on github), Vue is definitely going to overtake React usage in the long run unless another new library appears or React changes significantly.

> Weird thing, commits to Vue are decreasing over time and are mainly done by a single individual

https://www.patreon.com/evanyou - It's his full time job, he's making over $15k a month on Vue, everyone else is just an open source contributor.

For better or worse this does not scale with how Facebook is supporting React

Comparisons in Google Trends are extremely easy to manipulate (or just interpret wrong). The ".js" you added to Vue is killing its results, and the generic term "react" is propping that one up.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

or how about

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Maybe alexa matters?

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/vuejs.org

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reactjs.org

Or maybe one community uses their respective primary domain more than the other for one reason or another.

React also has more than 4x as many dependent packages in npm, which could be propping up its install count.

If you look further in Alexa by country I believe it says that React's rank is higher than Vue's site, but that in China Vue is insanely hot.

> React also has more than 4x as many dependent packages in npm, which could be propping up its install count.

I don't think this would do anything. If you have three packages that depend on React, you still only install it once. If anything, the number of packages that depend on React is an indication of its popularity.

> Comparisons in Google Trends are extremely easy to manipulate (or just interpret wrong). The ".js" you added to Vue is killing its results, and the generic term "react" is propping that one up.

The search I linked to is not a keyword search but rather extracted topics. Your criticism is just based on misunderstanding how Google trends work. Not saying it is accurate but in both of your "corrections" to my link you are getting less accurate Google Trend results.

You typed vue.js so technically your results are less accurate. :/

Regardless of the fact Google trends is not even an accurate way to gauge usage of vue or react to begin with.

Vue.js category that I used is the official Google aggregate category. You do not understand how Google Trends work. There are keywords you can use or you can pick Google aggregate categories. I pick the aggregate category, which generally should be the most accurate.

I am not responding to any more because it seems that people refuse to understand it.

Quite likely Google is underrating Vue, because Vue has heavy presence in China and Google does not.

Sounds like you’re upset vue is more popular than you wished.

I think it's interesting that much like on the global trends on Google [1], Alexa surfaces that Vue seems to have some traction in China:

    Country         Percent of Visitors   Rank in Country
    China           59.1%                 631
    United States   8.7%                  7,245
    Japan           3.7%                  6,109
    Iran            2.8%                  2,373
    India           2.2%                  8,422

    Country         Percent of Visitors   Rank in Country
    United States   33.3%                 3,312
    China           9.8%                  6,694
    India           8.5%                  4,016
    Japan           4.9%                  7,585
    Iran            3.6%                  2,632

The top Sites linking into React (according to those Alexa links):

upenn.edu (US) hateblo.jp (Japan) facebook.github.io (US) yiibai.com (China) infoq.com (China)

And to Vue:

sina.com.cn (China) csdn.net (China) wikia.com (US) cnblogs.com (China) blog.jp (Japan)

[1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

My experience with Alexa incoming links is really inaccurate. The numbers are fairly decent for popularity though.

Similarly to number of stackoverflow questions not being a valid gauge for popularity, I don't think that this is necessarily representative of popularity. What if react is simply more mature and doesn't need to market itself as much, so more people are using it than need to find out about it?

> Weird thing, commits to Vue are decreasing over time and are mainly done by a single individual

The Sistine Chapel was mainly painted by a single individual.

(for the record, Michelangelo had apprentices to help him mix plaster, etc. But he phased them out when it came to painting. Traditionally master painters had apprentices which would paint with them, but he would rather avoid the differences in opinion and arguments while painting the chapel. He had the vision and the skill. I think that’s the case here as well. Not saying Evan is Michaelangelo, but he does have a good vision with his product and the skill to execute on it.)

Exactly, the dude has a background in arts and design. Something that I truly believe helped shaped vue.js to what it is.

> For Vue to catch up to the number of React stars would mean that their rate of starring is significantly higher.

That's pretty interesting actually, and presumably means a lot of people find Vue interesting, yet it's not as widely adopted as React.

> The writing is clearly on the wall (or the stars are on github), Vue is definitely going to overtake React usage in the long run unless another new library appears or React changes significantly.

I mean, that is if React usage slows down and Vue's continues to grow. I didn't draw that conclusion from the links you provided (but I didn't conclude otherwise either).

Edit: a downvote with no reply? Why the downvote? Did I say something that's wrong?

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