Mozilla Webdev

Download Stats move to mozilla.com

• By Mike Morgan

During the Firefox 3.5 launch, Daniel Einspanjer and Dave Dash put together a neat little stats counter at downloadstats.mozilla.com. We decided to do a sprint to try integrating this with mozilla.com to give it a proper home.

Historically, we’ve had different ways to track new releases and their downloads:

• 2004-2007 (Firefox 1.0, 1.5, 2.0) – Bouncer database statistics tracked redirects on the download redirector in a MySQL database.
• 2008 (Firefox 3.0) – Jeremy Orem’s download stats page pulled stats from Daniel Einspanjer’s metrics feed.
• 2009 (Firefox 3.5) – Daniel and Dave created the 3.5 download stats page, which closely resembles what we have now.

Blast from the past – Jeremy Orem’s Firefox 3.0 stats page:

As a part of our renewed efforts to innovate more rapidly on mozilla.com, our first sprint brings download information to mozilla.com. From release to release we hope this page changes in exciting new ways. In the meantime, it’ll have a nicer place to live.

The idea was pretty simple:

• Creating real-time JSON feeds was Daniel’s work with SQLStream to manage and constantly query incoming download activity. It was no small task, but the feed seems to work fairly well.
• Using JavaScript to integrate feeds into existing pages was Dave Dash’s work. He had to do it in both YUI and jQuery since mozilla.com uses YUI but the stats code uses jQuery. Yes, fun, we know.
• Creating widgets and a landing page was possible because of Silver Orange. Steven Garrity and Stephen DesRoches styled the stats landing page and worked with John Slater from Mozilla to figure out points of entry on other mozilla.com pages.

The end result is a nicely sized update to mozilla.com that we were able to finish in two weeks. Publishing our totals gives new users a feel of activity and freshness, and funnels them to a statistics page that we can always expand later.

We’re also excited that this page uses some neat tools we’ve grown to love:

• The world map is done in SVG/Canvas thanks to Alistair MacDonald
• The dynamic table uses jQuery and some jQuery plugins (tablesorter, sparklines). It updates every minute.
• All feed data is available in JSON format which makes it easy for pages to update themselves via JavaScript

Here’s a widget on Firefox product pages:

Here’s a widget on the personalize Firefox page:

Here’s the main sections from the main stats page:

We hope you like the small changes we made, and if you have ideas on how to make this better, please let us know! If you’d like to play with these feeds, you can find them here:

• Country report JSON
• Total downloads JSON

Tags: downloads, stats, streaming

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About Mike Morgan

Mike Morgan is the Director of Web Development for the Mozilla Corporation. Mike joined the Mozilla community as a volunteer in 2003 and has worked on Mozilla's mirror management software, update system and addons.mozilla.org. These days he spends most of his time on strategy, recruiting and helping his team embrace their inner nerd.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.