c3's InSide Scoup

It was an amazing countdown to 50 million downloads for Firefox. Fans of firefox always want to know how many downloads are occurring in real time by a counter. So came the development of counters and feeds. But I could not figure out to getting one due to the scattered data available. So this post is an effort to find how to place a firefox download counter on your site. Many of these tools are created by efforts of the hard working Firefox teams, supporters and fans.

First, Firefox released its download count as an RSS feed. Now you can figure out its applications.

Firefox extension users may get the Tickerfox firefox extension - it tracks the latest Firefox download count while it the counter ticks away in your browsers status bar.

The Infocraft firefox counter project provides another popular counter. The official download feed only updates once every minute, so it takes a minute for the script to grab two feeds to calculate a download rate. The counter makes use of the increasingly popular XMLHttpRequest object to pull data from the feed in the background. They also give detailed instructions on how to use this script on your website or adjust it to your needs. Requires PHP knowledge.

Another neat counter using PHP is here inserted alongwith some text effortlessly and php code posted here.

Another one is the Animated Firefox Download Counter. This user script for the Greasemonkey (v0.2.6+) Firefox extension adds an animated counter (all animated with javascript) of the total number of Firefox downloads to the upper right corner of html pages. You can toggle fading by clicking on it, click and drag to move it around, double click (on the firefox picture) to close it. The script makes use of the Firefox counter from Infocraft, but provides a different display available on all pages.

There have also been efforts to create Download counters in flash for those who do not know PHP. Just use the .swf file or zip file. See an example of flash counter here (.swf flash file). Another flash counter spotted here which seems to replicate the top right hand corner of the spread firefox site.

Here is C# code to access the Firefox counter and use it's value numerically. It's formatted for web visualization. In reality, the long lines would be on one line.

Found another quick javascript way of inserting the counter. This shows how firefox download count shows on a button. Firefox Tutor has another javascript based css styled counter.

I also found this neat FF counter on this site. There also some efforts to use the feed to plot download graphs.

This Wordpress plugin will allow the user to use php code to allow them to display a the current number of Firefox downloads. They can format and utilize this number anywhere in their templates. Also located another Perl script to grab the counter number.

Now after all that jargon,
Here are some simple ways of putting such images on your site with a simple img tag, of course they will not show live running counts like those using PHP, but should keep updated and suffice for many users.

One simple img code is found on this post


If you want something bigger try this code (uses iframes)