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Mozilla Outage On Firefox 3 Record Launch Day
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jun 18, 2008 07:47 AM
from the oops-sorry-that-was-me dept.
from the oops-sorry-that-was-me dept.
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.
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A Few Firefox 3 Followups 407 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Using data generated by the Mozilla Firefox download pledge page, the map on this blog post ranks countries, not by absolute number of pledges made, but rather on a per capita basis. This analysis yields some interesting conclusions about where open source is strongest and weakest."
Anonymous Warthog writes "That didn't take long. In a blog posting from the TippingPoint DVLabs security team (of Kraken and CanSecWest hacking contest fame), they confirmed that they reported a vulnerability in Firefox 3.0 to Mozilla a mere five hours after it was released. Additionally, there was a posting on the Full Disclosure security mailing list from someone that purports to have another vulnerability in the works as well. In the grand scheme of things, this probably means nothing to the general security of Firefox, but you can be sure the browser zealots on all sides will be watching carefully."
Finally, from reader Toreo asesino: "Microsoft have congratulated the Mozilla team by sending them their second cake (minus recipe) to Mozilla's Mountain View headquarters to congratulate them on shipping FireFox 3, which went live right on time last night." Congratulations are indeed due on both the browser and the release process — looks like the Firefox fever (despite some seriously taxed servers) resulted in more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
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Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [arstechnica.com]
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.
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Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Which is why XAML is so important (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Funny)
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What a relief... (Score:5, Funny)
Download Counter (Score:5, Informative)
By my calculations, they won't be able to hit the 10 million mark in time.
Hard to read (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Funny)
Try it in firefox
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Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Download Counter (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Download Counter (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Download Counter (Score:5, Funny)
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For the record (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For the record (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:For the record (Score:5, Funny)
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And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:5, Funny)
I am sure a New Zealander or German would have been just as helpful as a Canadian. But thanks for the complement.
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Pointy Haired Wisdom (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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Not impressed with the way this was conducted (Score:4, Informative)
Not counted (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually, it's 2:16 p.m. to 2:16 p.m. (Score:5, Informative)
So take heart, frustrated downloaders: you have 76 more minutes than you thought.
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Either way, the real winner is Guinness... (Score:5, Funny)
If they fail, they'll be drowning their sorrows in pints of Guinness...
Potentially harmful? (Score:5, Interesting)
Attempted to download Firefox (Safari on Windows XP) and I get this message when the download is complete:
Re:Potentially harmful? (Score:5, Informative)
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So rather than having a set time frame (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Portable Apps (Score:5, Informative)
I'm happily running Firefox 3 on my locked down corporate laptop.
W00t!
Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
-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.
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Re:OSS Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:OSS Incompetence (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Aren't these guys supposed to be better? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I would just like to say (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Doing well so far (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:World download map (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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