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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.
Isn't this one of those "there's no record yet, so anything we do is a record" records? Or is this the record book's attempt to record a genuine record and best the record of a previous record holder?
I understand the promotional impact that the record attempt has, but it still seemed dumb to me to invite the entire world to try to melt your servers by manufacturing a download spike.
It'd be nice if they could use bittorrent to help with the load they're putting on themselves.
During the outage, I was still able to find a mirror ftp site that had the 3.0 install, and download it, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been, and lots of other parts of the mozilla site went down at times, too, making it difficult to find extensions, or just information.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
oh wait. Oh and next time use UTC for your times.
Only those who download Firefow from the website will be counted? That would be pretty much only the Windows users, I guess.
Lots of people just use Synaptics or whatever package manager their distro provides. In my case it will be typing "emerge -avuDt world". I'm not going to download from the website just to get counted, you know.
I am not really here right now.
Sure, 'cause the guys making the browser are the same guys running the servers.
So you're blaming the browser developers, who developed a quality product, for addons not working. That's quite...naive.
Is it conceivable to think that there are mozilla fanatics out there downloading
just to run up the numbers?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Why is it that 24 hours after the crash happened, we're now hearing about how the servers were down 24 hours ago?
The REAL news: According to the download counter, Firefox has long surpassed their stated goal of 1.5 million downloads, and is now over 6.5 million. This is cause for frontpage news, not the stupid server crash.
Well, since there *was* no actual Guinness Record for this thing before, I'd say they actually broke it with the first download.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Ah yes, and that's something that should be built into Firefox.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Why not just pick the best 24 hour period after the fact ...
Hence if the site was down for an hour, just collect your data from 11am - 11am instead of 10am.
(I think someone already posted to that effect - but still, they don't have to commit to the first 24 hours, just the best 24 hours).
What the fuck does developing your software with an open license have to do with having an outage. I guess Amazon is open source too because they were down for an hour. I guess we can't trust those ass clowns either. I'd like to see you accomplish 1% of what the Mozilla dev team has accomplished or even great closed source applications can do. Die in a fire troll.
I dont think this even remotely compares to Akamai. Everytime I download something from Mozilla as opposed to going to a known ftp site, I get sent to a random country's university ftp site. Err, what exactly is the advantage of sending my packets across the globe at 1/3rd the speed when the local university ftp site is sitting there unused?
Mozilla doesnt have localization and a slew of other features that Akamai and Amazon use. From what I can tell its just a random mirror. That's a fine strategy for delivering the software but not for something like trying to create a new download record.
Maybe. I downloaded it yesterday, installed it, spent and hour trying to make the location bar work the way it should, and uninstalled it. I hit a number of websites in that hour, scouring for tips on various settings or addons that could make it work, before I determined my best choice was Firefox 2.0.0.14. =p
I think they'll be a bit of a leveling off as some people decide that the arbitrary changes are just not suited to them, and move back to something else for a while until things settle out.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Give it a try for a week and you'll get used to it. I've been using Minefield for months and I absolutely hated the awful bar the first time I saw it. Once I figured out how to make it work for me it became much less annoying. Being a wikiholic, the most annoying change was that I needed to start by typing "wiki..." instead of "en.wiki...".
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
There is a difference between automatic updates and N million people going to some URL and knowingly and willingly downloading some piece of software.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Who would you expect to be ahead of Germany? There are countries with larger populations, but they're substantially poorer per capita; fewer of their people will be downloading Firefox today. Germany is the most populous country in the EU, it is very rich, and very technologically advanced.
To my mind, the only country that might have a chance of outFirefoxing Germany and taking second place would be Japan. And they're not so far behind (at time of writing, Germany is on 499,014 and Japan is on 369,364).
The big surprise here for me is Iran. 207,816 downloads, comparable to Britain, France or Spain. I suppose their wartime baby boom is now a generation of internet-savvy students. Can't imagine hardline fundamentalism keeping hold on that demographic for too long.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
While the poster you replied too was close to the mark, they missed by a bit.
/. kills sites all the time, without even trying and they could have just been unprepared for the response they got.
However your response fall right in line with what corporate America expects.
Corporate America doesn't fully trust Open Source.
There are many reasons and they ARE slowly coming around.
However, Firefox is a flagship open source project.
Meaning it is high profile, highly visible to EVERYONE (not just the back end staff running things like PostGres or MySQL, or even Apache), and expected to be a "polished finished product".
The fact that Mozilla ADVERTISED their attempt at a download record and then had these types of what appear to most normal people to be comical and poorly planned errors, lends great credence to the average persons suspiciousness of open source programs.
the true fact of the matter is, if Microsoft had done something like this, or Apple, or god forbid somebody like Red Hat or Sun or Debian, the likelyhood is the errors would not have happened, and if they had for the first two, there would be much crowing and jeering from the FOSS idiots who think anytime something like this happens to the "Big bad corporate entities" it's a good thing.
Your response falls right in line with what the average PHB or average MM would expect from a zealot.
[whine]It's not Mozilla's fault, they are giving this away....
Let's see you do better.....
They don't have the resources.....
etc.
[/whine]
here's an idea.....
SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE WHINING!!!!!
it just plain reeks of zealotism and makes the projects look bad.
Mozilla fucked up, plain and simple.
They might have done something stupid like intentionally disallow the upgrading from within a current version of FF (I personally tried all day and all i got was the "Sorry, but here's a helpful link to direct download it" message on several computers.) just so they could better track the direct downloads to give a true figure for their record. They might have also just simply not expected as many as they got.
It happens.
However, going around and whining and bitching and being an ass while trying to defend something that does not need your defense merely plays right into the preconceived notions of many people, and actually does a great disservice to the project.
so please, support the project but don't be the expected "religious zealot" type and further push the corporate types away from this and other very good and very useful open source projects.
History has many examples on how you are wrong.
Crappy product with decent PR campaign would outsell cheaper and better alternative which isn't advertised properly. This is given.
In nuts, few people make intelligent decision before jumping on board. Some do that just to try something new.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
So my option is to invest a week of time with lower productivity (I know, posting on Slashdot at work != productivity har har). In exchange, the software will go from "awful" to "less annoying"?
That doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
It's a big threat. Firstly, they push MSN search as the default search engine on IE. That's a lot of advertising dollars right there. Secondly, the more people who use alternative browsers, the more websites will cater to those browsers. Using Linux used to have a lot of downfalls because a lot of websites didn't support any browsers that ran in Linux. Now that many windows users are also using alternative browsers, it means that most websites also work with the alternative browsers. That's one less reason why you wouldn't move to Linux.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Advertising dollars are very important, about $47.5bn important, so while the techies at MS may be happy to coexist, I'm sure the people who tell those devs what to do would prefer everyone to use the MS-default search and advertising options. Last I saw, Firefox didn't come with Windows Live Search set as the default.
Open Recipe cake only benefits you if you compile it yourself. Otherwise, you don't know what may have been slipped in at compile time.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
You'll notice that it was the team, not the CEO, who sent the cake.
Well, der. If Ballmer personally sent a cake every single time a competitor (or potential competitor) released a product, he'd do nothing all day but send cakes. I don't see that as an indicator of anything.
Comment of the year
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I really don't understand the hate for the "Awesomebar". You do know that if you start typing a URL, it WILL look up that url? For me, the functionality is identical. To get to gmail, I type "g" hit down, hit enter. Facebook, f, down, enter. Slashdot happens to be s or sl. As far as I can tell, it has all the old functionality and a bunch of the new. How is this a problem?
The reason that Microsoft pushed XAML as hard as they do is because they wanted to once again control the web. Some moron in Microsoft's marketing department must have thought that with XAML being easy to use and implement would stop supporting html/xhtml and slowly move over to XAMl based applications.
This, of course, didn't happen for the same reason activex didn't become hugely popular: it's not compatible with other browsers.
The web has come far enough now, that microsoft cannot really control it realistically.
But then, another goon in marketing thought that Silverlight would be the answer...
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I paid a lot for this car radio, but they threw in a car with it.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
It's about controlling the development platform, which grants enormous power:
-- The Windows monopoly is strong because so many applications only run on Windows. If all apps were Web apps that worked in Firefox, the "applications barrier to entry" is gone and it's suddenly much easier for users to switch away from Windows. That is Microsoft's greatest fear.
-- Controlling the platform means your apps will work first and best on the platform.
-- Controlling the platform lets you be the gatekeeper for all kinds of innovation. For example, if someone invents a new kind of hardware device it's not much use unless you support it in your platform so that applications can use it. By adding or denying APIs and components you can bless or curse all kinds of initiatives.
-- Controlling the platform lets you decide what software will be preinstalled. For example, you can favour your own media codecs.
It's not directly about money; it's about power. But power can be monetized.
But once we passed the 1GHz mark the things that a big portion of the home users do works perfectly fine. I am still typing this on that old formerly WinME 1.1GHz that has been happily running an OEM of Win2K Pro for these last 8 years. For what I use this computer for,downloading software,web surfing,checking my webmail and watching the occasion Youtube video, it runs like a dream. And while I used to always have at least one machine running the latest MSFT OS so I could stay ahead of my customers problems Vista took my 3GHz Celeron with 2Gb of RAM and made it feel like a 486 trying to run WinME.
True funny story about Vista. My mom who knows squat about computers asked me the other day "What is Vista and why does it suck?" When I explained I asked where she had heard of it. She said she was browsing the cameras in Wal Mart killing time while my youngest nephew picked a game for his birthday and overheard this conversation next to her: "Customer(CR)..I want to buy this laptop. Salesman(Sm)..That is a good choice sir it is a very powerful laptop.(CR)Which Windows comes on it?...(Sm)..Vista Home Premium sir...(CM)WHAT! Vista sucks! No way! Just forget it!..(Sm).Don't worry sir,it comes with Vista but we'll be happy to give you a copy of XP on CD to go with it..(CM)What am I supposed to do with that? I don't know anything about building computers!..(Sm) Don't worry sir,if you simply leave it with us for an hour I'll take it in the back and install XP on it myself. It'll be all ready to go.(CR)..OOH! Wonderful! I'll take it then!".
As for me most of my customers are either avoiding Vista like the plague or are bringing Vista machines and asking for XP to be put on them. So whether you love Vista or hate it(I vote hate but YMMV) perception is reality and the public says Vista sucks. So the have to keep extending the life of their old OS,which has already sold on countless millions of machines still in operation, so they can't try to sell machines based on their new OS this time. Which is why IMHO they wanted Yahoo so badly. That would have made them the biggest webmail and given a big boost to their search.
Speaking as a PC repairman I can tell you that most folks over 1GHz are quite happy with what they have. Instead of buying new they simply bring it to me to clean up and back up on occasion. Since in business if you aren't growing you're dying MSFT needs new revenue streams to keep forward momentum. If everyone is using Firefox which defaults to Google search that is tons of folks who will never see a Live search ad. Heck,my of my home customers whom I've switched think "Firefox search" is the greatest thing since sliced bread,as they can just type in that little window to the right and find whatever they want. Those folks will likely never know that Live search even exists. So while I am sure the developers of IE are nice and like competition,I can see management being worried. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.