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... the counter is still up. With less than 5 million to go before 100,000,000, I don't want to miss the final tick as it goes by.

While I agree that Microsoft's way leaves much to be desired (primarily because AJAX on IE requires that you leave your browser open to ActiveX insercurities), I'm afraid there isn't really a "correct" way to do it. Your way (testing for the native XMLHttpRequest object, and then falling back to the ActiveX object if necessary) is certainly the best way, however.

IIRC, Mozilla's XMLHttpRequest object was created to mimic the functionality of Microsoft's ActiveX version, and then Safari and Opera (to a certain extent) followed suit. However, the XMLHttpRequest has never been part of ECMAScript (the standard that Javascript is based on) nor the W3C DOM. It has always been an "extension" that Microsoft has foisted upon the world, much like the <marquee> tags and layers we love to hate.

As such, it is inconsistently supported -- particularly in Opera and Safari 1.3/2.0. There are also minor differences (e.g. the number of arguments that the send method accepts) that arise due to the lack of a standard specification.

Fortunately, because of its immense utility in creating modern web-apps, it has become a de-facto standard and thus rather reliable. I would love to eventually see browsers support a standards-based version of AJAX (something like the W3C Level 3 DOM Load and Save specification), but until then, there is no truly "correct" way to do it.

The Firefox counter is currently reporting a firefox download rate of 9 per second, the biggest that I have seen there. Usually it is between 3-5 per second

There's info on it at this URL.

http://www.infocraft.com/projects/ffcounter/

All the inner workings are described there.

--Enjoy!

just take a look at the source code and you will see that i caches stuff etc: http://www.infocraft.com/projects/ffcounter/