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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.
I'm quite sure Amazon would have been delighted to host mozilla.com temporarily on the EC2 cloud, or Akamai on their service, just for the bragging rights of supporting the most downloads EVAR!
Victoria's Secret learned a LONG time ago when broadcasting their "Fashion show" online for the first time: If you want to deal with massive hordes of salavating geeks, you need to use a CDN.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Unfortunately their numbers are going to be off, too. I had to download it several times before I got to a mirror that didn't still host RC3..
I wonder who the 1 person in Chad that downloaded Firefox is
No mention of it anywhere I looked on the mozilla site...
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Attempted to download Firefox (Safari on Windows XP) and I get this message when the download is complete:
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
WTF is Turkey doing on the counter updates? It's not scoring particularly well (~50k downloads). There are many countries that kick its ass like Italy (~200k+) or Poland (~160k+) and are growing much quicker. I bet it's due to a mozilla turkish employee who hacked the counter! ;)
I couldn't hit their servers yesterday, so instead I hit the releases.mozilla.org ftp mirrors directly. Will those count towards the record? Anyone know how they are counting? Thanks.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
No, he's pointing out the inherent problems staging a "download day" publicity stunt for a piece of software who's true potential isn't yet ready.
And not only are users downloading it, they're installing and using it. Usage of Firefox 3 has gone from under 1% to over 4% in less than 24 hours. That's a quarter of all Firefox users already using the latest version, or many million new Firefox users.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What's the proper way to install FF3? Overwrite FF2 installation or uninstall FF2 and install FF3?
I would like to keep all the passwords, cookies, history and extensions...
I've been using it since Beta 3, only found one or two bugs. They could have just released it a long time ago. In fact, as of Beta 5, a long-term release of a certain popular Debian-based Linux distro was shipping with it.
The record attempt got a lot of free publicity, got the name out, and probably increased word-of-mouth by people who decided to help try to set the record, passing the word on to everyone they know.
Unfortunately, many millions of people ended up not even seeing the release until 1PM local time. And then, at 1PM, the site quickly went down. So the actual experience probably was a negative for a lot of people. Someone should have told Mozilla Foundation that June 17 starts at 12:00:01 AM in every time zone.
So was the exercise a net gain or net loss in terms of public awareness of Mozilla and public perception of Mozilla quality? I'm thinking the execution could have been quite a bit better.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I reckon they should have gone for UT+1 - the same time zone as CERN in Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee created the web.
What are 5 Betas and 3 RC releases for anyway?
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
It's as screwed up there as elsewhere. Maybe they should try creating valid HTML and/or CSS at some point, as neither the HTML nor the CSS seems to validate.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
I'm a new Firefox user. It just so happened that my IE decided to not allow me to edit items on my company SharePoint site without crashing EVERY TIME. I spoke with my TR department to see what options I had and they were as follows...
My possible solutions were:
1.) Install IE 7.0
2.) Install XP SP3
3.) Migrate to another web browser
TR had the following responses:
1.) You can upgrade to 7.0, but we cannot support it.
2.) We are not deploying SP3
3.) FireFox 3.0 is being released today, you could download that and see if it solves the problem.
Sure enough, after a quick download and install, everything is working fine. I'm still not sure what was causing IE to crash every time I tried to open a link in Sharepoint, but at this point in time - I don't care.
Funny? You think this is funny? This is not funny. We are going to LOSE our ability to resize text.
... still not acceptable.)
Remember the dot-com era? Remember the overdone, NON-user-friendly, Flash-overloaded websites?
Well, we are going to get more of that. Flash lets you circumvent the principles of the Web, one of which is: I get to decide how YOUR data streams are rendered into graphics for ME. I can ditch everything in italics tags if I want to! I can make it bigger, smaller, different font, no pics, no ads, YOU NAME IT.
Thank your lucky stars that you can still manipulate part of the websites you see.
Because "content" providers don't like that. They want YOU to take it as a whole, and that means locking it all in Flash. Flash that you can't change text size on or remove ads from. (Yes, I know it's possible to figure out OCR programs that can find text in Flash graphics and change its size. But let's not kid ourselves. NO ONE will bothere to actually program that. Think about it. We can't get anyone to write a simple color transform plugin to help color-blind people read pictures such as maps that have poor red/green coloring schemes. You think someone's going to give you a LireSux plugin? HELL ****ING NO.)
You're EXCITED about all your webby functionality, and all you're going to do with LireSux 3? I'm not.
I'm not looking forward to my bookmarks and javascript whitelist being deleted again. (Yes, I know how to recover the bookmarks
I'm not looking forward to deleted functionality (like making addresses in the drop-down address bar not load instantly when I click on them) and then the LireSux folks deleting evidence that this functionality ever existed, all while Internet Exploder happily carries it, and then hearing LireSux fanboys gush about how DANGEROUS that feature was and how it should be removed and HELL NO I shouldn't have the choice to bring it back, even in the buried-deep options list.
I'm not looking forward to fill-in lists popping up on web forms, which cover up stuff I want to see and aren't even convenient to invoke! (Thanks for making me move my right hand that far, morons.)
I am, however, looking forward to the neat feature that lets you load sites in IE. That's pretty cool.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Out of legitimate curiosity, why do many Slashdotters think that Microsoft sees Firefox as a threat? They currently give out IE for free, so it's not like they're making money off of it, and the vast majority of Firefox installs go on Windows computers, so it's not like Firefox significantly is increasing Linux adoption...
Hell, the IE team sent them a cake:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/06/17/the-cake-is-a-lie-ie-team-bakes-a-treat-for-mozilla
And I'd wager it makes their jobs a lot more interesting and important, so there's no resentment there.
I don't get why Microsoft would care, frankly.
Comment of the year
Maybe Firefox is a boon to the employees on the IE team, by forcing MS to pay people to improve their browser. Firefox is a burden to Microsoft (the company), because it forces the company to pay people to improve their browser. You'll notice that it was the team, not the CEO, who sent the cake.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
I wonder if any FF had more downloads in one day than any Windows service pack.
"Go forth, and be excellent to each other" --Bill & Ted