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.

Comments

Cause found, not to worry.

[mrRay720]

A large chair-shaped dent was subsequently found in the side of their web server, and a large sweaty man was seen running from the scene of the crime shouting "DEVLOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Was he running on two legs or on all fours?

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[Anonymous Coward]

He was swinging from tree to tree.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[indifferent children]

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.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[gbjbaanb]

They actually use Live Search as the default search in IE, I'm not sure MSN Search even exists (it appears to just redirect to Live Search.) But yes, you're right that that does net a lot of advertising dollars, no doubt. I think they rebranded everything from MSN xyz to Windows Live xyz, and then just Live xyz. Next week it'll be something different. I remember when they did this with .NET, *everything* was xyz.net.

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.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[flink]

Out of legitimate curiosity, why do many Slashdotters think that Microsoft sees Firefox as a threat?

Microsoft is terrified of the web becoming everybody's primary application platform, rendering the OS irrelevant. That's why they started giving IE away with Windows in the first place: they wanted to crush Netscape. There was a little antitrust suit about all this a little while back.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[PhxBlue]

They currently give out IE for free ...

No, they don't. If you run Windows, you paid for IE.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[morcego]

Out of legitimate curiosity, why do many Slashdotters think that Microsoft sees Firefox as a threat?

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.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[TemporalBeing]

Microsoft will always pay people to develop IE because it's their single most important app. They recognized a long time ago that the Web was the gateway into the Internet, and that the Internet was the future of computing. So why did they let it languish for years, and only pick it up again when Firefox started to be a pain in their market penetration numbers?

Microsoft sought to become the main gateway into the Internet by developing IE. If you're using IE you had to buy Windows, right? I hear you can run IE under WINE just fine. So, not necessarily though highly likely.

This is why Apple has to keep developing Safari. Apple probably kept developing Safari to guarantee a minimum level of web functionality on the MacOS, so user's can get to higher profit things like iTunes, etc; and to do so without relying on Microsoft or anyone else. It just makes sense to do so.

Now it's completely viable to get on the Web without giving Microsoft a dollar. I'm not sure they expected that to happen either, despite their best efforts to the contrary. It's been completely viable to get to the web without Microsoft since before the IE existed; and has always continued to be. Anything to the contrary is just a dillusion on your part (and Microsoft's).

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[ArsonSmith]

I paid a lot for this car radio, but they threw in a car with it.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[commodoresloat]

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. Yeah, that would really cut into valuable chair-throwing time.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[roca]

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.

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[ATMD]

Hahaha, I just had the mental image of Ballmer sitting behind his desk writing gift tags on endless mounds of cakes... Very surreal, thankyou :)

Re:Cause found, not to worry.

[hairyfeet]

Ummm.....because the know that computers have long passed "good enough" for most folks and they need to get into the Web in a big way to keep profits from declining? You have to remember that MSFT got used to having folks throw out their machines every 3 years because the speed improvements would blow you away. And whose OS was on every one of those? know I myself traded up from a 200MHz to a 400MHz to a 1.1GHz in a little over 3 years time and of course they all came with MSFT software(the last with WinME...shudder).

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

What a relief...

[Dale549]

I thought it was my browser ...

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[jollyreaper]

It isn't a stretch to think about it. Tens of thousands of employees upgrading their browsers...still, Mozilla's servers should be able to handle that.

Download Counter

[magister159]

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.

Re:Download Counter

[pdusen]

What 10 million mark? Their stated goal was 1.5 million, and now they're over 6. They've well-surpassed their mark.

Re:Download Counter

[paroneayea]

True, unlikely they'll meet the 10 million mark. But originally they were setting a goal of 5 million. Seeing as how it's well over 6 million when I'm writing this, I'd say they're doing a damn fine job.

Re:Download Counter

[elrous0]

Well, since there *was* no actual Guinness Record for this thing before, I'd say they actually broke it with the first download.

Re:Download counter

[antiZ]

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! ;)

Re:Download Counter

[zeromorph]

Up to now the record broke them ... or at least their servers.

I used Firefox 3 beta for quite a while now and it's great. Nice to see that a flagship of FOSS has such a sustained success.

(BTW - yes I missed a chance for a "in soviet russ..."on purpose.)

Re:Download Counter

[bunratty]

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.

Re:Download Counter

[Dak RIT]

According to Mozilla's own FAQ, There's currently no official record (for the Guinness Book of World Records), so whatever number they end up at is going to be the record.

However, as many people have pointed out several times already, there's probably a lot of things that get more downloads.

It's worth noting though that one of the requirements for the record is that all the downloads should be human initiated (so turn off your download bots).

Re:Download Counter

[JCSoRocks]

In Soviet Russia, chance misses you!

Re:Download Counter

[SydShamino]

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.

Re:Download Counter

[Ctrl-Z]

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...".

Re:Download Counter

[ThePhilips]

There is a difference between automatic updates and N million people going to some URL and knowingly and willingly downloading some piece of software.

Re:Download Counter

[Kamokazi]

Hmm, if I keep replying to my own -1 Trolled posts, I bet I can knock my karma down a couple pegs.

Re:Download Counter

[0232793]

http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/05/mozilla-world-record-problems.php is the blog entry

Re:Download Counter

[SydShamino]

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.

Re:Download Counter

[MidKnight]

You might not have searched enough. You may be interested in this plugin, which, to quote the page, is ... specially designed for those that dislike the AwesomeBar.

The memory & performance improvements are more than enough to convince me to upgrade. And personally I think the new location bar is a step up, but I can understand how others might dislike it. HTH.

Re:Download Counter

[Koiu Lpoi]

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?

Re:Download Counter

[jez9999]

No, it changes the old functionality significantly, especially for people who would use the first few letters of (sub)domain names to identify a URL. For example, I used to access Wikipedia links by typing 'en'; it would ALWAYS come up with a Wikipedia URL. Now, typing 'en' comes up with an AMO URL, and numerous other URLs with 'en' in the name. And just now, I wanted to visit the Wimbledon tennis champs website so I typed 'wim'; with the previous URLbar, that would give me wimbledon.org as the first address. Now, it comes up with 3 before it, like a Wikipedia entry on Wimbledon.

I'd say it's better in some ways, and worse in some ways. I kinda preferred the old bar. But anyone who says the new bar is always better is wrong.

For the record

[WiglyWorm]

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?

Re:For the record

[elrous0]

I myself claimed the "most automobile wreckage ever recovered from a human rectum" record last year. Though the attempt wasn't intentional, I'm damn proud to be in such noteworthy company.

Re:For the record

[mctk]

Go on.

Re:For the record

[elrous0]

Did you know that every emergency room in the southern U.S. now how a Guinness representative on staff? I didn't until last year.

Re:For the record

[Convector]

But does every emergency room in the southern U.S. now have Guiness on tap?

Re:For the record

[mollymoo]

I agree, car analogies are the Ford Edsels of the English language.

Doing well so far

[FoolsGold]

As of now, 6.5 million downloads - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Re:Doing well so far

[WeeLad]

His name is also Chad.

And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[nweaver]

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.

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[christopherfinke]

Yeah, because Amazon *never* goes down.

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Amazon is a pregnant wife?

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[jrumney]

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.

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[o1d5ch001]

with massive hordes of salavating geeks, you need to use a CDN.

I am sure a New Zealander or German would have been just as helpful as a Canadian. But thanks for the complement.

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[gad_zuki!]

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.

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[Anarke_Incarnate]

How can my wife read slashdot from her spot in the kitchen?

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[Zarquil]

I'm sorry, but you need to apologize to those poor people south of the border. There is no way they're going to believe you're polite and friendly starting off your comment with, "You dumbass!"

You should know we have to carefully craft our backhanded compliments.

Now let's sit down and have a beer. I hear the Russians are catching up to our downloads now that their hockey team has finished practice.

Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort...

[bograt]

She's using the Jura F90 coffee maker, apparently.

Pointy Haired Wisdom

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:Pointy Haired Wisdom

[burris]

You can't easily count bittorrent downloads, especially since they are only counting completed downloads.

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?

Re:Pointy Haired Wisdom

[TheSeer2]

I've been wondering, what promotional impact does it have? Compared to a newspaper ad, I don't see this having too much of an impacts except amongst people who already use it.

Re:Pointy Haired Wisdom

[mgblst]

Are you sure you know how BitTorrent works?

Not to such a great extent, no. You win!

Re:Pointy Haired Wisdom

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:Pointy Haired Wisdom

[LordSnooty]

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.

Not impressed with the way this was conducted

[Metasquares]

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.

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true - if you RTFA you'll see that netcraft confirmed it !!!

Hard to read

[Mateo_LeFou]

Sorry, the font on that page is so small I can barely read it.

Re:Hard to read

[neuromancer23]

>> Sorry, the font on that page is so small I can barely read it.

Try it in firefox

Re:Hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

OH ho! Yes, is funny because font is so big!

Re:Hard to read

[MyLongNickName]

If only they made a browser where you could somehow increase the font size.... I think I am going to patent that idea.

Re:Hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you are supposed to read the download counter with Firefox3 using its shiny new Zoom feature!

Re:Hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder they are having such a hard time with bandwidth. Use a smaller font next time!

Re:Hard to read

[emag]

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.

Re:Hard to read

[DriedClexler]

Funny? You think this is funny? This is not funny. We are going to LOSE our ability to resize text.

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 ... still not acceptable.)

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.

Not counted

[HyperQuantum]

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.

Re:Not counted

[luserSPAZ]

Not to burst your bubble, but Linux users only account for a tiny percentage of total users anyway, so I don't think it will make much of a difference.

Re:Not counted

[frission]

If you wanted to be counted, you can download it and NOT install it.

Re:Not counted

[badpazzword]

What are 5 Betas and 3 RC releases for anyway?

Re:Aren't these guys supposed to be better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, 'cause the guys making the browser are the same guys running the servers.

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[CDMA_Demo]

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

Wally Thought

[martin_henry]

Is it conceivable to think that there are mozilla fanatics out there downloading
just to run up the numbers?

Re:Wally Thought

[phoenixwade]

Is it conceivable to think that there are mozilla fanatics out there downloading
just to run up the numbers? it's "inconceivable!" (but the word may not mean what i think it means...... heh

Actually, it's 2:16 p.m. to 2:16 p.m.

[Robotech_Master]

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.

Question

[pdusen]

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.

Re:Question

[f8l_0e]

Why is it that 24 hours after the crash happened, we're now hearing about how the servers were down 24 hours ago? Because this is Slashdot, where describing servers engulfed in flames is a type of fetish pr0n.

Re:Did RC3 become the final release?

[glorpy]

Yes and yes.

Who currently has the record?

[MMC Monster]

No mention of it anywhere I looked on the mozilla site...

Re:Who currently has the record?

[vdgmr1213]

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.

Re:I would just like to say

[cordsie]

Greenland is beating North Korea, Western Sahara, and the Falkland Islands COMBINED!

Either way, the real winner is Guinness...

[jpellino]

If they make it, everyone goes to Guinness' book site to see the record.
If they fail, they'll be drowning their sorrows in pints of Guinness...

Potentially harmful?

[urcreepyneighbor]

Ugh. What the hell?

Attempted to download Firefox (Safari on Windows XP) and I get this message when the download is complete:

Windows found that this file is potentially harmful.

To help protect your computer, Windows has blocked access to this file.

Name: Firefox Setup 3.0.exe

Re:Potentially harmful?

[Albanach]

You might want to read this from Microsoft. In particular, take a look at the setting for DefaultFileTypeRisk

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[elrous0]

I suspect the IE team set their own Guinness World Record for "most human urine ever baked into a cake."

Holy kneejerk, Batman!

[MasterOfMagic]

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.

Re:How to take market share from Apple.

[mgiuca]

Firefox does have an auto-update feature, and the world record attempt is not counting downloads using it.

So rather than having a set time frame

[mgiuca]

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).

Direct FTP counted?

[molo]

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

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[compro01]

\Joke\, n. [L. jocus. Cf {Jeopardy}, {Jocular}, {Juggler}.]
Something said for the sake of exciting a laugh; something
witty or sportive (commonly indicating more of hilarity or
humor than jest); a jest; a witticism; as, to crack
good-natured jokes.

Re:OSS Incompetence

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Record launch?

[radarsat1]

Cool, I didn't know they were starting a record label. What kind of music are they into?

Re:firefox should be about quality not hype

[Candid88]

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.

Portable Apps

[flyingfsck]

Three cheers for Portable Apps!

I'm happily running Firefox 3 on my locked down corporate laptop.

W00t!

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[Macthorpe]

whoosh /wu, w, wu, w/
-noun 1. a loud, rushing noise, as of air or water: a great whoosh as the door opened.
-verb (used without object) 2. to move swiftly with a gushing or hissing noise: gusts of wind whooshing through the trees.
-verb (used with object) 3. to move (an object, a person, etc.) with a whooshing motion or sound: The storm whooshed the waves over the road.

Re:1pm - 1pm eastern time is not really a day

[Mushdot]

I reckon they should have gone for UT+1 - the same time zone as CERN in Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee created the web.

7 million and going!

[MassEnergySpaceTime]

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.

Re:Install over Firefox 2?

[Flooded77]

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.

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[Jamu]

That's why you should only eat open-recipe cakes.

Re:World download map

[meringuoid]

surprisingly to me, Germany is in 2nd place at nearly 475,000

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.

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[ChrisMarkus]

Firefox doesn't love IE though! At www.webuser.co.uk/firefox Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, said: "I hope that IE6 will quickly disappears, because it's so limited in terms of standards support. Repeat after me: die IE6, die! ;-) I hope that Microsoft's IE8 will bear fruits and help in this regard, also with the help of the other modern browsers (Safari and Opera)"

Re:OSS Incompetence

[initdeep]

While the poster you replied too was close to the mark, they missed by a bit.
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. /. kills sites all the time, without even trying and they could have just been unprepared for the response they got.

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.

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[Mox-Dragon]

mmm, yellowcake.

Re:OSS Incompetence

[Ex-MislTech]

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.

Re:firefox should be about quality not hype

[ThePhilips]

Produce a quality product and the masses will adopt.

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.

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[rrkap]

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.

Re:OSS Incompetence

[Zero__Kelvin]

"SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE WHINING!!!!!"

I can't recall the last time I encountered someone who so desperately needed to follow their own advice ...

Patches for windows

[acoster]

I wonder if any FF had more downloads in one day than any Windows service pack.

Re:Tried 3.0, downgraded back to 2.0

[Koiu Lpoi]

So I just accidentally went to a, um, NSFW website and now I can't erase it!

Shift-Delete when you bring it up. Generally, however, these things end up everywhere (cookies, search history, etc), so your friend Ctrl+Shift+Del (Clear Private Data) works just as well as FF2.

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.

Re:Tried 3.0, downgraded back to 2.0

[QRDeNameland]

The URL bar is so damn annoying in 3.0.

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.

Re:Aren't these guys supposed to be better?

[BZ]

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...

Re:10,000,000 downloads a day

[BZ]

Peak (right after release) was about 14Gb/s.

Which matches the likely 8m download count.

Which is why XAML is so important

[theolein]

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...

Firefox-mania

[Jasonjk74]

xkcd/firefox

Re:World download map

[a.ameri]

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).

Re:1pm - 1pm eastern time is not really a day

[mollymoo]

Except Swizerland is currently on Central European Summer Time, which is UTC+2.

Re:Microsoft-DDOS?

[Daniel Weis]

What idiot compiles a cake? You sir, need to take a cooking class. ;)