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.

Sorry, that was us.

[Anonymous Coward]

We slashdotted their site.

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 [mozilla.com].

By my calculations, they won't be able to hit the 10 million mark in time.

Doing well so far

[FoolsGold]

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

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?

[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 [arstechnica.com]

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.

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.

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:Not counted

[frission]

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

Re:Did RC3 become the final release?

[glorpy]

Yes and yes.

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:Aren't these guys supposed to be better?

[TheLinuxSRC]

You are absolutely right. I would never trust [google.com] a company whose site goes down.

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.

Re:Potentially harmful?

[Albanach]

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

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?

Portable Apps

[flyingfsck]

Three cheers for Portable Apps!

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

W00t!

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:Download Counter

[Dak RIT]

According to Mozilla's own FAQ [spreadfirefox.com], 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:Who currently has the record?

[vdgmr1213]

According to the Mozilla Download Day FAQ [spreadfirefox.com] [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: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 [jasnapaka.com].

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.

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:Download Counter

[0232793]

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

Re:Download Counter

[MidKnight]

You might not have searched enough. You may be interested in this plugin [mozilla.org], 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: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.

[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: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 [mozilla.org], 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.

To get back 2.0.0.14 ...

[j-min]

For all those who tried 3.0 and want to go back, here's a link to save you a lot of searching on mozilla's website: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html [mozilla.com]

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: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.

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

[mollymoo]

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