Mozilla Glow: Awesome Firefox 4 live download day map
glow.mozilla.org
glow.mozilla.org
* 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]
We perform the lookup using the binary database and the Java client directly off of the web request and only store the location in HBase so we don't keep the IP around in a database.
I thought the map was a static PNG image: http://glow.mozilla.org/maps/world_4.png
Edit: I stand corrected. I missed this call: http://glow.mozilla.org/maps/world_4.svg
http://glow.mozilla.org/data/json/2011/03/22/16/51/map.json
This would actually be an excellent opportunity for http streaming (ie, the forever frame), too. Long polling is great when you're waiting for a singular event, but not so much when it's ongoing data being pushed down.
While it is possible to set up WebSockets or something similar to do a truly fancy data flow, we preferred to spend our bandwidth resources on making Firefox 4 available for people to download. ;)
Inner regions like lakes weren't included since they would complicate the svg without a lot of benefit.
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.
(seen top-right here http://www.zeus.com/products/global-load-balancer/index.html)
https://github.com/stagas/maptail
It's pretty gosh darned awesome.
Ofcourse, FF3 was downloaded 8 million times in the first 24 hours [0]. That record won't be broken today.
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).
I guess Glow is an obvious name for map visualization apps.
"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.
All of our localization is done by volunteers, so please feel free to contact me if you'd like to get involved.
impressive nonetheless
Nice work!
Point to also consider is Alfred is a town with less than 10000 people and New York city has millions!
I think this has got to be a bug of some kind. Any explanations?
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.
I guess the point is, no one browser is perfect and until that point is reached any serious offering will definitely have a future.
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.
I've seen this behavior on my two machines: WinXP and Win7 (64-bit).
I have also seen Chrome using an excessive amount of memory on both machines. The reason for this, most of the time, is due to Chrome's design. As I'm sure you're aware, nearly each tab and plugin requires a separate process to allow for features like preventing the closing of the entire browser when a plugin crashes or dragging-and-dropping tabs from/to separate windows, etc. However, this is a trade-off between features vs memory usage, and Chrome's will inherently use more RAM than a browser like Firefox which doesn't follow the same process-spawning design.
This is the most common cause for excessive RAM usage, which could be labeled as user error (you shouldn't have so many tabs open, gosh darnit!!) but this isn't the only cause for Chrome's excessive RAM usage. I've definitely seen big spikes of memory being taken up for individual tabs, without any apparent reason. I've never taken out the time to really investigate the cause of this, but if it's not WebKit memory leaks I'm not sure what makes sense to blame.
Honestly, it has gotten better in the last few releases, but still not up to the bar Firefox 4 just brought it to. That browser just got so fast and lightweight. I switched to Chrome (and have stayed for a while) because I really dig its interface, and it feels fast. But lately, I've been dealing with weird performance issues especially when these unkillable child processes are present. I love Chrome for development though, it's got a really good set of tools right out of the box.
Basically, if Chrome's process spawning stuff was rock solid I would think it's just about perfect, and now I'm starting to think FF4 is getting there faster.
*Note: definitely not trying to start a debate on which browser is better, I use both and I like both, but I was just elaborating on what I had said about performance before.
Speed doesn't matter if I can't get the browser to behave how I want.