Gonna buy a can of beer or two ad honorem of this field day. Keep going!

I was wondering if automatic Firefox update to 1.0.1 and later to 1.0.2 had any influence to the counter. I guess we can't really count those as downloads.

Donny, I don't count downloads that came from the auto-update system.

- A

When will 1.0.3 be released?

It might be a good idea when it is released to diff the spike in non-update downloads compared to normal, and use the same proportion to 'clean' the counter of undue 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 influence.

Asa, Firefox's product page currently says "Join more than 25 million others...". It'd be thoroughly cool if instead it said "Join 44,296,813 (and counting) others...".

Greg, indeed it would. Any chance that you could help code that up?

- A

Also the old counter was very prominent on the SFX page. It used bold typeface and bright colors. The new one looks quite bland from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.

poynting, feel free to contribute designs :-) If you can theme up a number in some cool way, please do. The old number was fully manual and I did it in Photoshop. That's no longer possible.

- A

I'd suggest the CSS route. Perhaps a box similar to the green ones but blue with a square display and prominent numbers. I'd take a stab at it out but I'm exhausted and Firefox doesn't do a full save of the page (@imports) so I can't easily mess with it.

Here is one way to do this. The blank.gif background file I've used is the 110x32 one available here:
http://sfx-images.mozilla.org/affiliates/Buttons/110x32/blank.gif

I'm sure it's horrible and there are a zillion improvements, I'm not an expert on web design issues. This is just proof of concept stuff

<style>

div.counter
{
background-image:url(blank.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
height: 32px;
width: 110px;
font-weight:bold;
font-size:16px;
color:#cc3300;
font-family:sans-serif;
line-height:32px;
padding-left:8px
}
</style>

<div class="counter">
1234567
</div>

This isn't really satisfactory though, because people can vary their own font-size leading to silliness.

This means you will probably have to actually include the superimposed text on the image file.

Assuming SFX uses PHP:

<?php
header("Content-type: image/png");
$im = imagecreatefrompng("background.png");
$orange = imagecolorallocate($im, 220, 210, 60);
$px = (imagesx($im) - 7.5 * strlen($number_of_downloads)) / 2;
imagestring($im, 3, $px, 9, $number_of_downloads, $orange);
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
?>

You should be able to use your old background.png file. This is basically copied from Example 1 on the PHP image functions reference page does.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.image.php

I don't know what the server load would be like in this case.

poynting, you should contribute that at the Spread Firefox forum devoted to just such work. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=forum/63

- A

Why not use the 25'000'000 counter we had (the cool black one), but save each numeral as an individual image file so that you can construct the number out of seperate images for each number, that way it looks cool and is live! Not hard to do either.

Is it me, or is that thing going up freakly fast? I mean in just one page refresh it leapt like 20 places O_o. 20 new downloads started in one second, that's a lot of people per hour!

Kroc, if you're interested in helping to build something like that, please head over to the Spread Firefox forum and let others know. I'll bet you could partner up with some of the other folks interested in doing the same thing.

Oh, and about that number moving fast... take a look at it in about 9 hours when it really starts screaming (we're near the bottom of the daily curve as the the Americas sleep and Europe is just getting off to work.)

- A

>Is it me, or is that thing going up freakly fast?

Now you know why we need 10 Gbit/s of download server capacity on release days to keep up. :)

do you count re-downloads by same person as new too?

if I need to re-install windows I needed download firefox again.

when I downloaded the Dutch version of firefox some extensions see Dutch as German so they did not work in the right language so I download English version again.

pheloxi, we're not counting people or users. We're not claiming this is counting users and we never have We're counting downloads. We don't count updates but we count all downloads. If we were counding users, we'd have to put some kind of tracking tools in the browser and we're not going to do that. If we want usage, we can get that from large tracker sites like onestat, websidestory, or thecounter. This isn't users or usage, though, it's downloads.

- A

thanks for explaining....

some might interpret it as users.

do you get any usage feedback from search engines and other website from get "sourceid" with "mozilla" or "related sourceid" in search plug ins?

Bug in the counter..

clicking on different tabs on the site ("spread the word", "forums" etc..)
give different numbers on the counter (not increasing chronologicaly)

using firefox 1.0.2 for reference.

Best program on the net!!!!!!

Asa,
The downloads are really picking up. This is great to see. Keep up the good work, bro.

Paul B.

Kroc Camen, you mean this (just made by me)?

Minghong, That rules! Is that CSS wizardry? :)

Too bad it doesn't work in Internet Exploiter though.

I'm wondering: isn't SVG supposed to be capable of this? E.g. you can transform XML content to SVG? Of course, the number should be saved in XML format then...

Darkelve, yup, too bad that IE failed miserably on CSS. But I wonder if there is IE users that are interested in a Firefox download counter. XD

SVG? This has nothing to do with SVG. And not to mention that SVG is not built in Firefox at this moment (may be enabled in version 1.1 thought).

@minghong
You 0wn! That's excellent. I'm far to tied up with current tasks to chip in so I can only watch from the sidelines :*(