Today’s the big day for the official, no-longer-beta release of the Firefox 3 browser. There is even a campaign to make today, June 17, Download Day and “set a Guinness World record for most downloads in 24 hours.” They are shooting for 5 million. Although, I’m not sure that there was a previous Guinness record to break, so any number might qualify.
But if you are going to go for a world record, even a made up one, in a single day, you might want to give yourself some running room by starting at the beginning of the day. But instead of releasing right after midnight, the new browser won’t be ready for downloading until 1 PM ET. Before then, when you go to the Firefox download page (or here or here), you are still prompted to download Firefox 2.
I can wait another 15 minutes, and I won’t be surprised if Firefox hits its download goal. Already more than 1.7 million people have “pledged” to download the browser today. Firefox 3 has the following features to recommend it:
—Much faster load times
—Fixed memory leak problem in Firefox 2
—An “Awesome Bar” (aka smart location bar) that suggests sites you’ve visited before or bookmarked when you type a URL into the address bar.
—Better security against phishing and malware
—One-click bookmarking
—Offline capabilities
—Built-in spell-check and session restore capabilities (like Firefox 2)
—Cool zoom-in feature
—Looks better on a Mac
Here is a list of all the new and improved features, as well as known issues.
Heavy Firefox users who download it today had just better hope that all of their add-ons work. (They will have 5,000 to choose from, but maybe not their favorite ones).
Firefox is the No. 2 browser with 18 percent market share compared to Internet Explorer’s 75 percent. (Its market share is higher among early adopters, perhaps 39 percent market share). Forget the world record for most downloads in a day. The real record Firefox is going for the most-used browser, period. This release should help it gain some more adherents.
Update 1:11 PM ET: The Firefox download page seems to be inundated right now. I am still waiting for it to load. Those 5 million people are going to have to wait a little longer. Maybe they should have made opened up the download floodgates by timezone at midnight in each country to spread things out.Has anybody been able to download this thing.
Update 1:19 PM: Still waiting. Now the page loads, but it’s the old page with Firefox 2. Come on, Mozilla. There’s a world record at stake here.
Update 2:30 PM: Back from lunch. Still waiting.
Update 4:37 PM: The downloads started about an hour ago, and Mozilla is reporting 14,000 downloads a minute. That is 840,000 per hour if it can keep it up. But access is still spotty. I’m still waiting.
Update 4:43 PM: Someone sent us this “secret” link where you can download Firefox 3 from a different server than the ones on the main site. It is only for Windows. (Download at your own risk). I have a Mac. So I’m still waiting.
Update 6:50 PM: After giving up for a few hours, I am finally downloading Firefox 3.0 
Update 6/18: Despite the delays and hiccups, Firefox 3 was downloaded more than 8 million times in the first 24 hours it was available, surpassing its goal by 3 million.
I’ve got FF 3 RC3 and it won’t update to anything newer and the download page show 2.X and FF3RC3 as well. Will there be a newer one today or not???
I will download on 4 different computers using 3 different IPs, as probably many techies will do, so will might boost those results.
I’ve been using FF3 for months. It’s the best. Period. Especially for JavaScript-heavy pages like Google Reader.
3 more minutes. I’ll be downloadin…
FF3 beta I’ve also been using and i can say it has just come to acquire the market
Great move..increase the chances of crashing the server by releasing it in the middle of the workday. Let’s see if it holds up.
Did anyone build FF 3.0 minefield today ?
It rocked…. Sun Spider gave it it a higher score than Opera which disappointed me.
I’ll be looking at moving back to firefox then
GTG It’s download time
spreadfirefox.com is down at 10am, PST. doh!
The previous couple of FF3 betas have been pokey on the Mac. Safari blows it away, particularly the tuned nightly builds. Hopefully the release steps things up.
They really should have just decided to wait another day and release it at midnight, if they want as many people as possible to count. But in reality, it’s just another stupid world record that doesn’t mean anything so who cares I guess
That aside, FF3 is great. I’ve been running it for a few weeks and it is wicked fast. I love the new theme and the awesome bar. I am having some stability issues, but it may be one of my extensions, not sure yet. I am crashing on average probably once per day, but the session restore feature works well so it’s not the hugest deal yet. Will be looking more into the cause once it starts getting more annoying.
This is one big gimmick. I pledged wasted 30 minutes of my time trying to search for download ff3.0 - then found out in one of their blogs that its coming only at 10 am PST.
Now its 10 am PST (12 CST), mozilla.com or mozilla.org web site is taking too long to respond.
Probably mozilla’s servers can’t support so many hits.
Site is down.. it’s going to be hard to hit that number if no one can access the site.
Can’t connect
The website was down few mins ago, now it’s back.
I’m still waiting…
Yeh im waiting also, but still nothing. The site now is down. I will be posting about it a bit later on http://crenk.com
Yup, they are down. I can’t believe I waited all morning for this and they crash right out of the gate!
All mozilla links are down including the internal updating. Not a great start for them…
I am expecting the download should go via http://www.mozilla.com/product.....lang=en-US ?
Still waiting!!!
It is already 1pm, right?
Haha, they in effect DDoS’ed themselves with their record attempt, I thought they would have anticipated massive server load! Both spreadfirefox.com and getfirefox.com are down…
Seems like its going live at http://mozilla.mirrors.tds.net.....%203.0.exe (7.14 MB) !!
I hope this is final version? The http server does work though…!!
Hello, Mozilla, anyone there?
Mozilla should just put up a youtube video with Rick Astley. That would be an awesome Rick Roll.
Still down at 10:09 am PDT
mozilla.com and mozilla.org is down
FYI - I believe this is the ‘official’ link for the record, but still down:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord
yeah, i’ve trying for about thirty minutes not to access the site….
Mozilla FTP: ftp://mozilla.isc.org/pub/mozi.....n32/en-US/ !!
Waiting for it go live! Old setup in folder (RC3) ?
Still down 10:11.
I am very disappointed. It’s 1 AM at my side. I stayed up all night for this…=(
Anyone that’s got their own server and can actually get to the site, download it and Share
You can sacrifice your bandwidth for a month.
Actually, for teh uninformed, the site was actually down at 9:45PST, I actually witnessed the moment, one second I’m loading the World record page, the next I get a “Too long to respond” from the blog page.
Started downloading
Stop fussing about the time. It’s midnight somewhere. And I’m sure there is some kind of requirement from Guinness that it be done this way.
I find it funny that they had all this hype for this download and come time to release, the site is down. Hopefully it’s just a hiccup because playing with the RC version, I really like the new features.
@Zhao Lin
I’m waiting, too. It’s 01:13am here in Taiwan.
Can I download it today?
@Pallab are you Kidding?? The site hasn’t updated yet.. it still has not updated with FF3!! Good Fun!!
Seriously… they hype it up this much to break the world record, but they don’t prepare for the load?
10 minutes later, and still waiting…
Well, it’s on bittorrent… haha
http://thepiratebay.org/search/firefox%203/0/99/0
I think that the link for hiring people should add also a Network Administrator and better web servers
Got through but it’s still saying Firefox 2 is the latest version…
The firefoxdownload site is back up, but still showing 2.0.0.11
check this live stream to see what they are up to at Mozilla HQ
http://www.mogulus.com/air_mozilla
Still waiting here http://releases.mozilla.org/pu.....eases/3.0/
If you click through, and go to the setup folder, the date on the Firefox setup file is old, still from June 11th, although its down now too.
Got this message this time
We’re not quite ready yet!
We’re just as excited as you are for our upcoming release, but we’re still putting the finishing touches on Firefox 3: preparing the new mozilla.com website, getting our severs ready for downloads, and doing our final pre-launch checks. You can follow our progress if you’d like!
The files in this directory are - for now - only meant to be used by our testers. Downloading them directly can harm our ability to distribute Firefox efficiently, and will also not be counted as part of our attempt to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in a day.
If you’d like to be notifed the minute that we launch, please go to sign up for Download Day. Or just head over to getfirefox.com on Tuesday, June 17th after 10am PDT.
As long as it is a little more stable than the beta versions I will be very happy!
sent from: fav.or.it [FID164435]
http://air.mozilla.com/ — So Boring! Come on Guys.. Launch It!!! x-(
Still got 6 things on there checklist to do
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_3.0
Ok, I’m in the GMT+6 time zone and guess what ? their site is not loading. This is how mozilla is trying to set a world record ? well it’ll be a world record for “most people trying to open a website without being able to for 24 hours”
LOL
This is opening : http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/p.....lang=en-US
Its going live?
hey guys in Mozilla HQ, is it possible to launch FF3, instead of endless chatting!?