Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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...
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.