Firefox Goes for World Download Record

Kelson writes "For the upcoming release of Firefox, Mozilla is preparing Download Day 2008: a campaign to set a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Participants are asked to pledge to download Firefox 3 on the day that it's launched. The exact date hasn't been scheduled yet, but everything seems on track for June."

Patch Tuesday

[pjt33]

What's the current record? I'd expect MS service packs to set a pretty high bar. Also, how are they counting? If Debian get Firefox 3 through into testing on the day (which I doubt), would an install via aptitude count, or are they only counting direct downloads from Mozilla?

followed by most rollbacks to version 2...

[Anonymous Coward]

because many popular plugins are not 3.0 ready :-(

Re:Patch Tuesday

[unlametheweak]

I would suspect "software downloads" would imply an independent application and not a patch or a service pack. I'm sure they have their servers prepared to get Slashdotted and Digged, etc for the marketing event. Though I wonder why Microsoft with it's money couldn't hire a marketing firm to think up something savvy like that for Internet Explorer.

It would also be a great opportunity to promote bittorent as a mass downloading medium. Too bad it doesn't seem to be in the plan.

Why should we?

[greenpete]

I have used Firefox for a few years and love it's potential. But it has always been buggy and I was forced into v3 when I updated Ubuntu recently and I think it's got worse! It crashes more now, they have changed features that I loved (like the way you save U/N and P/W) and on top of that most of my plugins don't work anymore :-(

Re:I pledge not to download it

[Zebedeu]

A not only history, it also searches your bookmarks, which is something that I've always wondered why it wasn't implemented before.

Now you don't have to navigate your deep bookmark folders for that link, just start typing the name and it appears directly under your cursor.

Re:followed by most rollbacks to version 2...

[nem75]

How the hell is this "+5 Interesting"? There are roughly a gazillion of FF2 extensions out there, many of them have not been actively developed anymore for months or longer. So of course many (I'd rather say most) are not available for FF3 yet - and will probably never be.

The core extensions (yes, the definition of that term varies from user to user, I'm aware of that - but only to a point) are available though. Like Adblock Plus, Download Statusbar etc.

Others are available for FF3 from the developer's homepage only and cannot be found on the Mozilla site yet, e.g. because the extension itself is still beta. See Firebug for instance.

Anyway, I don't see that massive rollback happening.

Not the goal

[Nerdposeur]

It would also be a great opportunity to promote bittorent as a mass downloading medium. Too bad it doesn't seem to be in the plan.

Could they track the number of downloads if they used bittorrent? Also, if their goal is a record number of downloads for Firefox, do they want to set up an additional hurdle for people? "First, you have to download and install one of these other programs. No wait, we can explain why. Come back."

Re:I pledge not to download it

[Anonymous Coward]

I would dare say this is one of the biggest improvements to the web browsing experience in the last several years.

unless of course you already used Opera or even Internet Explorer. Both have had this features for quite a while, in this case FF is sadly playing catchup.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[elrous0]

Bittorent doesn't allow for tracking downloads. It's one of the things that really holds it back for general use for a lot of companies. For example, a lot of internet TV shows would LOVE to use bittorent to reduce their download overhead (which is HUGE), but how are they supposed to determine their "ratings" if they're not sure how many donwloads they've had? They used to talk a lot about this over at DLTV [dl.tv].

Re:Why should we?

[Kattspya]

That's the most brilliant thing I've seen in it so far (I've used the portable beta 3 for about an hour). When the password prompt isn't a window you can make sure the pasword is correct before storing it.

Re:Patch Tuesday

[shift3]

I bet WOW patches are high ranking.

One problem with this is, how many people actually download from ONLY the HTTP source? The wow Patcher uses a BitTorrent based P2P system. There is a rather high chance that you will get little, if any from their Direct HTTP Download source on any given patch day. Now, as the time that the patch was released and the time that you are downloading increases, this amount will increase as not nearly as many people will have the P2P Updater running.