Firefox 3: Setting a world record can teach you a valuable lesson

June 18th, 2008 | by emontero |

The folks at the Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the increasingly popular Firefox web browser, decided they would release the latest version of their hot application with an interesting goal in mind: break the world record for most downloads ever for any application in a day. Incredibly, before the 24-hour period ended, the world record was already broken:

The Mozilla team had aimed to exceed the 1.6 million downloads that Firefox 2 achieved in the first day of its release period, and had hoped for five million downloads for Firefox 3 in its first 24 hours of release, to set a Guinness world record.

Approximately 14 hours after its release, Firefox 3 passed the five million download mark. President of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, told ZDNet.co.uk that he felt as though he was in “a dream”.

I’ve never seen a community so passionate about any program before this. It was simply amazing. However, the dream was more like a nightmare for most people in the US during the first hours of the release. Some folks even had to wait 5 hours after the scheduled go time for a successful download. Evidently, admins were not prepared for the massive onslaught of requests that overburdened the servers.

Moral of the story? You better be ready well in advance for vast amounts of requests, especially if you’ve been screaming to the world you would be. In this day and age, can you really afford the bad publicity you’d get if, all of the sudden, your visitors start receiving cryptic error messages?

Live and learn.

Anyway, just in case you have not given Firefox 3 a try yet, please do so now (I guarantee you will not regret it).

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  1. 5 Responses to “Firefox 3: Setting a world record can teach you a valuable lesson”

  2. By Dan on Jun 19, 2008 | Reply

    yes! FF3 is awesome but unfortunately i was one of those users caught in the windstorm of requests and had to wait an hour or so before I was actually able to download the latest release and this was at 5PM EST!

    Lovin the newest version though, now I just need all my add-ons to be supported…

  3. By Mike on Jun 19, 2008 | Reply

    The first time I heard about the attempt to set a world record I thought: Wow the must have asked Google or someone for lots of servers to handle all the requests. I was surprised went I tried several hours after the download day began, only to be greeted with an error.

    I guess the underestimated their own popularity…

    BTW, I think currently there’s not such a record, they are just trying to create one.

  4. By emontero on Jun 19, 2008 | Reply

    Guys,

    Here’s a follow up on Slashdot:

    http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/18/217205.shtml

    @Dan,

    I heard most developers will get 3.0-compatible versions of their add-ons within the first 1 - 2 months of the release. Hopefully, that will be the case. I can’t live without Firebug! :-)

  5. By Mike on Jun 21, 2008 | Reply

    Actually there’s a beta for ff3 of firebug:
    http://getfirebug.com/

    and you could also edit the plugin of your interest to see if it works, I did that to All in one gestures and it works pretty good.

    Just open the plugin with winzip or whatever (the plugin is a zip file) and edit the install.rdf file replacing the compatible version information for something like 3.* rezip and drag and drop to ff.

  6. By emontero on Jun 21, 2008 | Reply

    @Mike,

    Thank you very much!

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