

Mozilla Glow: Awesome Firefox 4 live download day map - gkoberger
http://glow.mozilla.org

======
gkoberger
Some info about it:

* Like Firefox, it is open source! <http://github.com/potch/glow>

* Counter was started this morning at 6am PST.

* Each dot represents one download.

* Map is generated using SVG, "pings" are divs with rounded corners, country radial charts are canvas.

* The bars across the bottom shows downloads per minute.

* You can drill down to the city level, to see how many downloads from your town. (Click the bottom left circle graph)

* Created by Matthew Claypotch (<http://potch.me>) and Jeff Balogh (<http://jbalogh.me>) on the Mozilla Web Dev team.

[edit: added open source information]

~~~
gluegadget
Wondering where did you get that map. Caspian sea is missing.

~~~
potch
The map was generated using continent-level shapefiles (I believe from here:
<http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2006/1187/basemaps/continents/>). We stuck with
continent-level outlines because adding country boundaries would have
needlessly complicated the SVG, and borders can sometimes be disputed and
controversial things :)

It would have been nice to have the great lakes and caspian sea, because
they're such large features but with a team of two webdevs, some things have
to wait until version 2.

------
JonnieCache
If someone wants their own, realtime version of this have a look at Maptail,
written in nodejs:

<https://github.com/stagas/maptail>

It's pretty gosh darned awesome.

------
51Cards
Me-thinks that IE9's much touted 2.35 million downloads on day one is not
going to seem so impressive by the end of today.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
FF4 passed 2.35 million downloads at 3:50pm ET.

Ofcourse, FF3 was downloaded 8 million times in the first 24 hours [0]. That
record won't be broken today.

[0] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7462900.stm>

~~~
fwenzel
We'll see. Keep in mind that we had about 2 million Firefox 4 RC2 users who
already have the "final" version and are therefore not counted on the download
map.

Also note that the map just started counting (yes, from 0) at 6am Pacific. So
there's still time until tomorrow, 6am Pacific until the 24-hour count is
over.

At any rate, this is not a competition ;)

(full disclosure, I work on the Mozilla webdev team).

------
devinfoley
I made an iPhone app called Glow about a year ago that visualized "feelings"
on a map in much the same way. I was working on a web-based global map as
well, but got bored of the idea.

<http://glowapp.com>

<http://glowapp.com/live>

I guess Glow is an obvious name for map visualization apps.

~~~
joshes
I'm not sure if it's just me, but I was clicking through the arrows to scroll
through screenshots on the front page of glowapp.com and found that two
captions seemed to be mixed up:

"Use Glow to share your feelings with friends on Twitter and Facebook. Update
your status and mood with a single click!" was next to a picture with stars;
while,

"Rating is easy. Just drag your finger across the stars. When you let go, your
feeling will be sent to the cloud." is next to a picture of sharing options.

Just a heads up.

~~~
devinfoley
Hey thanks! I'll fix that. Honestly I haven't done any work on the app or site
since last summer. I had some pretty good adoption at first, but usage really
fell off because, well, it wasn't providing enough value. Then I had a baby
and my time suddenly became a lot more scarce/valuable.

------
abcd_f
Reminds me of <https://secure.logmein.com/welcome/visualization/fullscreen>
(try moving the mouse around).

------
shimi
The locations names in Israel are phonetic translations and not their English
names (e.g. Yerushalayim translates to Jerusalem) wonder how they got it?

~~~
jbalogh
The names of regions and cities come directly from MaxMind[1], our GeoIP
service. Some of our localizers provided localized names to replace the
phonetic translations, so Russia, France, and Ireland see the real city names.

All of our localization is done by volunteers, so please feel free to contact
me if you'd like to get involved.

[1]: <http://www.maxmind.com/app/fips10_4>

------
daleharvey
I would have really like an overlay with the current timezones, its quite
interesting seeing most of the activity in europe and the east coast

impressive nonetheless

------
yoda_sl
This is quite a map/page. It reminds me the ApplemApp wall that was installed
at WWDC a couple years ago where you were seeing -kind of- real time the
downloaded apps from the AppStore, except they were not showing on a world
map. Anyway this FF4 page is in a way a cool dashboard !

------
51Cards
So have been watching this on and off today and it's neat to watch the main
concentration of downloads move with the morning hours across the map. Right
now it's in Europe as everyone goes through their morning "Oh look! FF 4
released!"

------
Jencha
Doesn't look like its working for me on Latest Chrome 10, Win 7. No dots :(

~~~
stevelosh
Chrome 10 on OS X here, working perfectly.

~~~
gkoberger
jedsmith: Since it's so resource intensive, it rate limits when not focused in
order to not waste your CPU.

~~~
jedsmith
Fair enough, but it did not resume normally when I gave it focus again.

------
ski2mi
Neat, although it would be interesting to see the effect of having dots
persist for more than one refresh, and perhaps fade over a few secs. I think
it would look much smoother. Nice job though!

------
JonnieCache
Would be good if I could see the advance of sunrise overlaid on the map.

Nice work!

------
jcsalterego
This reminds me of the node.js knockout landing page. I _believe_ there was a
map on that one. Unfortunately, I can't seem to dig up that page anymore.

------
thewisedude
if you look at NY state, you will see that the town Alfred has 86000
downnloads and a city as big as new york has 10000 downloads(1/8th)... I
wonder if anybody can explain that?

Point to also consider is Alfred is a town with less than 10000 people and New
York city has millions!

~~~
blickly
Not only does Alfred, NY reportedly have more downloads than any other city in
the world, or any other state in the US, but it currently has more downloads
than any _country_ other than Germany and the US!

I think this has got to be a bug of some kind. Any explanations?

~~~
TillE
There are a couple of universities in town. Maybe somebody's mirroring script
went crazy.

~~~
jbalogh
The logs showed all the downloads in Alfred were from curl. They've been
removed from our stats.

------
leh
Looking at Japan you can estimate where it was hit by the tsunami because of
the lack of pings.

------
gglanzani
The Netherlands density of downloads is pretty impressive. Can't find Malta
though.

------
lovskogen
Try resizing your browser and see why one should be careful with CSS Shadows.

------
mohsen
i have a question. i was looking at the continent/country breakdown the
download counts and i didn't see iran. did no one download from iran?

~~~
riobard
Here's why: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2356480>

------
3minus1
Looks like it's more popular in Europe than the US.

~~~
boredguy8
Looks like people are awake in Europe and starting to wake up in the US.

------
ptn
Try opening it with Chrome (seriously)

~~~
remi
Works perfectly, right?

~~~
andfarm
Works, but kind of sluggish by comparison. (Odd that I'd find myself saying
that about Chrome and Firefox!)

~~~
jbalogh
We worked hard to make it fast in Chrome. Their profiling tools were great at
finding some bottlenecks that improved perf in all browsers.

My guess is that we're pushing up against the limits of Chrome's repaint rate
when the map canvas starts cranking. That's not as much of a bottleneck in
Firefox since there's not a separate rendering process.

------
sabat
I should mention that under the hood, the live stream processing of download
events is being done by SQLstream, the startup I work at. :-)

~~~
sabat
Here's a blog post by Daniel Einspanjer from Mozilla describing how the
internals of this app work: [http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2011/03/22/how-glow-
mozilla-org...](http://blog.mozilla.com/data/2011/03/22/how-glow-mozilla-org-
gets-its-data/)

------
u48998
No one seems to be interested in Africa and Australia.

~~~
danpker
In Australia it might have something to do with the fact it's currently 3:35
am

~~~
luke_s
Well, its not 3:35 anymore! Australia and NZ are definately not listed under
asia which would be the logical place. This is very anoying, as I would really
like to see how FF4 uptake is going over here.

~~~
kumar303
Those countries are in Oceania

------
greyman
Nice map. ;-) Anyway, when Chrome and IE9 both seems to surpass Firefox, do
you guys think this browser still have a future?

~~~
sinaiman
Firefox is much more viable of a browser now that the Mozilla team has
addressed memory and performance issues, additionally the new "Firefox button"
view gives the browser the slim and minimal look that brought many to Chrome
in the first place. I've been using Chrome as my main browser for over a year
and I have to say, Chrome's still got issues (i.e. excessive memory use,
instability/slowdown sometimes due to orphaned processes). As for IE9, well it
won't run on XP, but I haven't used it myself so I can't list any further
problems it has, but I'm willing to bet a few exist.

I guess the point is, no one browser is perfect and until that point is
reached any serious offering will definitely have a future.

~~~
jedsmith
> Chrome's still got issues (i.e. excessive memory use, instability/slowdown
> sometimes due to orphaned processes)

Not to ignite a browser war, since I use and like both (and there's no point
bickering about it), but:

I've had my copy of Chrome dev channel, which you'd expect to be a little less
stable, open for about a week and I have under 300 MB committed (total) with 7
tabs open. I've closed a few, but here's what I mean:

<http://dropbox.jedsmith.org/hn/activity.png>

<http://dropbox.jedsmith.org/hn/browser.png>

Whenever I pitch Chrome to Firefox diehards, I always get the instability
argument like you're presenting. I've used Chrome as my primary browser since
about v3 when my desktop was still Windows, and the instability has largely
disappeared in the last year or so. I wish I could see evidence of the issues
that you and others describe, but it just doesn't happen to me on OS X and
Linux any more. I haven't had a sad tab or a browser crash in _months_. And I
develop in it!

What's different between you and me? I feel left out from the instability.

~~~
fluidcruft
Chrome (64-bit Ubuntu) is currently eating 934 GB with three tabs after being
open just under five hours. It's been a big enough problem for me that I bit
the bullet and upgraded my desktop to 8GB (to be fair, I was sort of looking
for an excuse). Flash is more stable under Firefox, but... Flash will bring
down Firefox occasionally. Flash doesn't bring down Chrome, but it also just
about never works. On the other hand, Flash can burn in hell for all I care.

~~~
BobSacamano
It's chewing up almost a terabyte of memory?

~~~
fluidcruft
Whoops, s/GB/MB/

