Mozilla Outage On Firefox 3 Record Launch Day 427
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.
Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: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.
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:4, Insightful)
Advertising dollars are very important, about $47.5bn important, [bbc.co.uk] so while the techies at MS may be happy to coexist, I'm sure the people who tell those devs what to do would prefer everyone to use the MS-default search and advertising options. Last I saw, Firefox didn't come with Windows Live Search set as the default.
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft will always pay people to develop IE because it's their single most important app. They recognized a long time ago that the Web was the gateway into the Internet, and that the Internet was the future of computing.
So why did they let it languish for years, and only pick it up again when Firefox started to be a pain in their market penetration numbers?
Microsoft sought to become the main gateway into the Internet by developing IE. If you're using IE you had to buy Windows, right?
I hear you can run IE under WINE just fine. So, not necessarily though highly likely.
This is why Apple has to keep developing Safari.
Apple probably kept developing Safari to guarantee a minimum level of web functionality on the MacOS, so user's can get to higher profit things like iTunes, etc; and to do so without relying on Microsoft or anyone else. It just makes sense to do so.
Now it's completely viable to get on the Web without giving Microsoft a dollar. I'm not sure they expected that to happen either, despite their best efforts to the contrary.
It's been completely viable to get
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:4, Informative)
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:Cause found, not to worry. (Score:4, Insightful)
-- The Windows monopoly is strong because so many applications only run on Windows. If all apps were Web apps that worked in Firefox, the "applications barrier to entry" is gone and it's suddenly much easier for users to switch away from Windows. That is Microsoft's greatest fear.
-- Controlling the platform means your apps will work first and best on the platform.
-- Controlling the platform lets you be the gatekeeper for all kinds of innovation. For example, if someone invents a new kind of hardware device it's not much use unless you support it in your platform so that applications can use it. By adding or denying APIs and components you can bless or curse all kinds of initiatives.
-- Controlling the platform lets you decide what software will be preinstalled. For example, you can favour your own media codecs.
It's not directly about money; it's about power. But power can be monetized.
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...
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)
Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Funny)
Try it in firefox
Re:Hard to read (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hard to read (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Download Counter (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a difference between automatic updates and N million people going to some URL and knowingly and willingly downloading some piece of software.
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Re:Download Counter (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Download Counter (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Download Counter (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
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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.
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Up to now the record broke them ... or at least their servers.
I used Firefox 3 beta for quite a while now and it's great. Nice to see that a flagship of FOSS has such a sustained success.
(BTW - yes I missed a chance for a "in soviet russ..."on purpose.)
Re:Download Counter (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Download Counter (Score:5, Funny)
For the record (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For the record (Score:5, Funny)
Re:For the record (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Doing well so far (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doing well so far (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And THIS is why you use a CDN of some sort... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You should know we have to carefully craft our backhanded compliments.
Now let's sit down and have a beer. I hear the Russians are catching up to our downloads now that their hockey team has finished practice.
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:Wally Thought (Score:4, Funny)
just to run up the numbers?
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to such a great extent, no. You win!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, many millions of people ended up not even seeing the release until 1PM local time. And then, at 1PM, the site quickly went down. So the actual experience probably was a negative for a lot of people. Someone should have told Mozilla Foundation that June 17 starts at 12:00:01 AM in every time zone
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Who currently has the record? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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).
Direct FTP counted? (Score:3, Interesting)
-molo
Record launch? (Score:3, Funny)
Portable Apps (Score:5, Informative)
I'm happily running Firefox 3 on my locked down corporate laptop.
W00t!
7 million and going! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft-DDOS? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Something said for the sake of exciting a laugh; something
witty or sportive (commonly indicating more of hilarity or
humor than jest); a jest; a witticism; as, to crack
good-natured jokes.
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.
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.
Re:OSS Incompetence (Score:4, Informative)
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:OSS Incompetence (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Aren't these guys supposed to be better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 HTT
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Re:I would just like to say (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
History has many examples on how you are wrong.
Crappy product with decent PR campaign would outsell cheaper and better alternative which isn't advertised properly. This is given.
In nuts, few people make intelligent decision before jumping on board. Some do that just to try something new.
Holy kneejerk, Batman! (Score:3, Informative)
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I reckon they should have gone for UT+1 - the same time zone as CERN in Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee created the web.
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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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.
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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.
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Which matches the likely 8m download count.