Ehsanul Haque » Record

24 Hours and 8,587,342 Firefox 3 Downloads

Ehsan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:28:52 +0000

The Download Day for Mozilla’s Firefox 3 is officially over and the total downloads of Firefox 3 at 3.16PM ET on 18th June 2008 was 8,587,342 despite the initial hiccup. Due to the technical problem Mozilla had yesterday the official start time of the Download Day was moved to 3.16PM ET of 17th June 2008.

Mozilla will now wait for Guinness to review the attempt. It may take few days before we all know if the record was officially entered as Guinness World Record.

Firefox 3 Download Day – Update 2

Ehsan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:03:21 +0000

Finally, all seems to be stable on Mozilla’s side. The sites are running fine now, both Mozilla and Spread Firefox sites. I used FF3 for around 2.5 hours while I was in office, and it didn’t give any problem. No crushing, no hiccups of any sort. The experience is better than FF2, which used to crash every now and then at the beginning.

After I returned home, took dinner and turned on my Mac, I downloaded FF3 for Mac OS X 10.5.3. Sweetly enough, it has not given any problem on my Mac either. When I went to Spread Firefox site, I found a new link to “Fluant It!“. You can enter your name and print a certificate that tells says you’ve successfully downloaded Firefox 3 to help set the record.

Last I checked at 9.04PM ET, total download counts 2,418,235. Around 1.7 million people pledged to participate in the record setting attempt. Total download has clearly passed that number. Exactly 15 hours and 56 minutes to go before the Download Day is over. Mozilla targeted 5 million downloads in 24 hours to set the Guinness World Record, which I think is well within the range and total may as well pass the targeted number.

Can Mozilla set the Guinness World Record on Firefox 3 Download Day?

Ehsan — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:38:50 +0000

It was kind of an excitement to participate in Download Day for Firefox 3. The download was scheduled to start at 1PM ET on 17th June 2008. The hype was so huge that it basically overwhelmed the web server. The main or parent Mozilla site was out of reach for about 20 or 30 minutes after 1PM ET, and the Spread Firefox site is still down (at 3.10PM ET) since the official release time.

I was able to go to Mozilla site to download the latest version. I installed it without any problem, although many have reported that FF3 crashed after installation and had to roll back to FF2. I subscribed to participate in Mozilla’s attempt to set a Guinness World Record. I received the email notification to download FF3 at 3PM. Although I’d already downloaded FF3, I wanted to see if there’s anything different at the link provided in the notification email. The site was unreachable for few minutes, but when I finally got into the page it was showing FF2 logo and link. I downloaded FF3 from the same link, about 15 minutes before I clicked on the link again from the email. The page rolled back to the FF2 download page. I could not stop myself from hitting refresh and the page that loaded after 2 minutes of wait time had Firefox 2 logo, link to download FF3, CSS was broken and all sort of messed up information.

I am sure Mozilla have planned for scalability to adopt to the load, but unfortunately that wasn’t enough. Spread Firefox site is still down. I saw on that site that Mozilla had download parties page, encouraging people to help set the record. I think that has also gone down. I had the feeling this will happen, but was really hopping it wouldn’t.

I hope Mozilla can set the record. If it does, I would know I was part of it.