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Download Day: The perils of shooting for a world record
This probably shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but if you encourage millions of users to download your software on the same day, your servers are going to take a hammering. But it appears that even Mozilla had no idea how many people would be trying to download Firefox 3 today.
There's a good chance that you may get through if you keep hitting refresh. And there's a good chance that the company will manage to break the world record if it ever gets the servers back up. But you know what? If you don't really care about setting a world record, Firefox 3 RC 3 is pretty much identical to Firefox 3 final. So if you're already running RC2 or RC3, there's no need to kill yourself trying to update your browser today. Tomorrow, next week, or even next month will probably be soon enough.
In the meantime, if you've got your heart set on downloading a next-generation browser, you can always take Opera 9.5 for a spin. That company's servers are holding up just fine.
Update: Some users are reporting success with these download links. Windows, Mac, Linux
Update 2: It looks like the site is back up, but incredibly slow. Like dialup slow.
Comments
31
Subscribe to commentspatchsmsJun 17th 2008 2:45PM
"Shades of Twitter, let's get a million people to simultaneously try to d/l the update and not provide the infrastructure to support it - after oh say 25 try again attempts got in hit d/l link and got sent to firefox 2 page, I can only hope this spreadfirefox site is not officially affiliated with Mozilla.org it's all flash and candy and a poorly built site at that. huge download now icon without a link to a d/l a nightmare to navigate. It's a damn good thing I love firefox or this experience would be enough to make me think about switching" I said this earlier you stole my rant!! good thing for you I'm not the AP newswire or I'd sue for content infringement! hee hee
toxic boyJun 17th 2008 2:46PM
Mac link: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx〈=en-US
Kylir HortonJun 17th 2008 2:48PM
I got it just fine. Go to the download link directly, you won't have any problems:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US
Kylir HortonJun 17th 2008 2:51PM
The "=win(" part of that URL should be shown as "& lang" (without any spaces or quotes, of course)
noselotJun 17th 2008 3:07PM
Yup, up again, although the speed is terrible, but at least the record is back on track.
Go Firefox.
bioadamJun 17th 2008 3:12PM
I made it through by typing "3.0" into the link for Firefox 2. The download was lightning quick. The install was even quicker. Kudos to Mozilla!
devteeJun 17th 2008 3:39PM
For live interviews with the Mozilla team, updates on the download count so far (and earlier, the problems with website updates), visit http://air.mozilla.com/
OblatedSpheroidJun 17th 2008 3:47PM
Mozilla Europe is going fine for downloads of FF3, so you could get it in Queen's English (does that work? I'm in England so don't care and am not affected)
Gardiner WestboundJun 17th 2008 3:51PM
After numerous attempts I successfully connected to getfirefox.com, downloaded and installed Firefox 3. Except it's Firefox 3 RC3. There is no way of knowing it's not the final version until after its installed and run once.
This version is not ready for prime time. None of my extensions work with it.
My advice to wait until Mozilla gets its ducks in a row.
GeorgeJun 17th 2008 4:09PM
I've just did some googling on Firefox 3.0 benchmarks and all I got was a comparison on how well JavaScript performs on various browsers, including FF3.
Frankly, I don't give a DAM, how well JavaScript runs. All I care about is PAGE LOADING SPEEDS. I'm a real speedo and hate stuff which slow me down. For some people, browsing the web is no longer a form of entertainment or something to waste time on. It's about productivity and getting things done as soon as possible.
I use Opera, because I want to be able to type in or click an URL and presto, it's there. I get the information I need, as fast as I could find it, and continue on with what I was doing before. IE and Firefox are just too bulky to be able to provide such experience.
BTW, why would anyone consider Javascript a good benchmark to mark a browser as fast or slow? I mean how many websites do actually use those kinds of heavy scripts that benchmarking websites utilize? It’s just doesn’t make sense. Can’t we get any kind of real-world testing, with real-world websites that people tend to visit instead of some imaginary code; someone came up with which no one would actually use?
mgthantzinJun 18th 2008 7:40AM
Haha... Opera 9.5 is used to take screenshot. :P