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Mozilla Outage On Firefox 3 Record Launch Day
Kolargol00 writes "An outage affected the Mozilla.com website on the day the organisation launched its Guinness World Record attempt for downloads of the new Firefox 3 browser. The mozilla.com site was unreachable from around the world, occasionally responding with the message, 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.'" Since they decided to run their day from 1pm to 1pm Eastern time, the download day is actually still going, so you can still get Firefox and be part of the record.
We slashdotted their site.
As unwise as it may be to post a link to the download counter on slashdot, you can find a real time counter here.
By my calculations, they won't be able to hit the 10 million mark in time.
As of now, 6.5 million downloads - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/
It seems like they really botched this, from not knowing when the date would be until last week to starting the day at 1 PM without getting the word out and now to their site going down in the middle of it.
Makes sense. The IE team at MS loves firefox: http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/06/17/the-cake-is-a-lie-ie-team-bakes-a-treat-for-mozilla
The Firefox people decided to start counting the 24 hours at 11:16 a.m. Pacific, after they got their servers back up and everything straightened out.
So take heart, frustrated downloaders: you have 76 more minutes than you thought.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Mozilla does have a content distribution network. www.mozilla.com is an alias for www-mozilla-com.geo.mozilla.com, which resolves to several different addresses at different times even from the same location. The downloads are further passed off to various mirror servers around the world.
If you wanted to be counted, you can download it and NOT install it.
Yes and yes.
You are absolutely right. I would never trust a company whose site goes down.
No, he's just not upgrading until all of the pieces are there instead of half-assing it. The "authors" he's talking about are the authors of the extensions, so it looks like he's being reasonable about this. It is the fault of the authors of extensions that their extensions don't work in Firefox 3. Nowhere does he blame the Firefox devs for this.
Firefox does have an auto-update feature, and the world record attempt is not counting downloads using it.
You might want to read this from Microsoft. In particular, take a look at the setting for DefaultFileTypeRisk
As soon as a client completes a download it makes an HTTP connection to the tracker and says it is complete. This is why every BT tracker/index-site is able to display a counter for complete downloads. Are you sure you know how BitTorrent works?
Three cheers for Portable Apps!
I'm happily running Firefox 3 on my locked down corporate laptop.
W00t!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I just saw the real time counter pass over 7 million downloads at 7:29am Pacific. At this rate, the download record will be about 8.3 million downloads. I think that's a very respectable number considering they were shooting for 5 million.
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
According to the Mozilla Download Day FAQ [spreadfirefox.com] the record has never been attempted before, but they are trying to get enough downloads to be officially given the record title.
I uninstalled FF2 and then installed FF3 and all of my cookies, passwords, etc. were still intact. Most of my extensions and themes were updated to work with FF3.
If you're paranoid and using Windows, you could also back up your profile with MozBackup.
Just visit any of the major news sources (I tried BBC, Guardian, SMH), they are all running stories on the launch. This is how you generate buzz when you have little to no marketing budget.
A torrent redirect would have served just as well,
and I think total downloads could still be tracked.
With it being a torrent all the ppl downloading would
have taken a LOT of load off the servers.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Because they do, and rightly so.
Remember then they took Netscape down ? That should be enough proof for anyone.
As for the reasons. Lets remember that marketing wars are fought and won on a single battlefield: the mind. Keeping your brand strong is very important. When people start using non-microsoft solutions for something, they are likely to start using non-microsoft solutions for others. Microsoft always made a lot of money pushing the idea they alone can provide solutions. People who start using Firefox are more likely to look toward OpenOffice.org.
The "search engine" issue was pointed by others, and is also relevant.
morcego
And besides, FF3 isn't a ram guzzling whore like 2 was. The upgrade is at least worth that.
Unless you like ram guzzling whores.
I didn't like it either. However, I quickly found an extension, oldbar, that pretty much restores the old URL bar functionality.
Past that, FF3 is pretty damn nice, IMHO. JavaScript execution alone is so much better that the improvement in browsing speed reminds me of getting broadband for the first time.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
For what it's worth, that sort of stuff was in fact in place (which is why things recovered in about an hour).
People had made some pretty conservative estimates of expected traffic based on current usage, etc to estimate what sort of traffic needed to be handled. Then the actual traffic was 12x as big. The peak download rate was more than 10x what it was with Firefox 2. The _lowest_ download rate seen so far is 3x the Firefox 2 peak rate....
But what really killed the website at first was the 2Gb/s of HTTP it was pushing out...
Peak (right after release) was about 14Gb/s.
Which matches the likely 8m download count.
For all those who tried 3.0 and want to go back, here's a link to save you a lot of searching on mozilla's website: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html
I'm not saying IP-based geographic detection is perfect (and I'm not sure about the exact algorithms Mozilla used to determine country), but Middle East's connections certainly don't go through Iran. Indeed, Iran has significant problems connecting to the rest of the world's backbones (due to all the political sanctions and embargos) and pays hefty fees to Turkey and Kuwait for its backbones' connection. The best analogy to describe Iran's Internet connection is a "dead-end alley"; no one connects through Iran.
Firefox is extremely popular in Iran, and a huge part of that, as the GP rightly pointed out, is due to the very tech-savvy nature of its very young population. You'd be surprised to find the number of Iranian Linux distros on distrowatch (and unlike China, these are real homebrew efforts and not government subsidised).
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Except Swizerland is currently on Central European Summer Time, which is UTC+2.
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