Filed under: Software, Internet, Internet Tools, Open Source
Despite a rough start, Firefox 3 Download Day a success
As reported earlier here on TUAW, Firefox 3 Download Day began with a whimper instead of a bang. Starting shortly after the official launch, TUAW received a number of tips from readers who tried downloading the vulpine browser and got...nothing.It appears that things cleared up fairly quickly. Several TUAW bloggers were able to successfully download the new browser about 90 minutes after the 10 AM PDT launch. The Mozilla Blog has a message from Paul Kim, Mozilla's VP of marketing, talking about the early difficulties and the subsequent download trend:
"Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through - but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability."
More highlights and records are outlined on the blog. Be sure to download your very own customized Thank You! Certificate, available here.
[via the Mozilla Blog]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
TomWBrowning said 8:10AM on 6-18-2008
Maybe mozilla should focus on making their browser not look like arse rather than breaking made-up download records?
Reply
Nano said 9:02AM on 6-18-2008
Whiner
Sam W said 9:53AM on 6-18-2008
Or how about trying to work with Apple on Preview.app or Adobe on Reader to get a PDF to display in the browser instead of downloading it then opening the set app.?
Jeffrey said 2:32PM on 6-18-2008
Your wish is granted. :)
http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/
Sam W said 5:39PM on 6-18-2008
Jeffrey...*bows down* you have made my day! Thanks so much
Think Adrian said 8:29AM on 6-18-2008
Why don't they have this as an auto-download in FF2?
Reply
quandmeme said 2:26PM on 6-18-2008
My take is that MS has everyone beat on downloads of patches and upgrades. If they want a record, they have to eb in a different category.
JKT said 8:33AM on 6-18-2008
>"It appears that things cleared up fairly quickly."
Wrong. As of 10PM EDT, I and several I know were still having trouble getting the site to load. After a half dozen tries over the next hour, I did finally get to it and get FF3 for OS X downloaded.
Ironically, one of my friends reports that the site loaded better using Safari than it did in FF2. At first this sounds like a bogus report, but I recall in the past when there were bandwidth problems, Safari did indeed tend to do a better job at squeezing bytes through than FF.
Reply
Squid7085 said 8:36AM on 6-18-2008
Damn, did I miss something big again? I swear, I need to spend more time on the interwebs.
Reply
Tony said 8:39AM on 6-18-2008
They were still shipping RC3 as of late last night - I wonder how many got the RC3 thinking they had the final?
Reply
Think Adrian said 8:39AM on 6-18-2008
http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/06/sweet-plugin-microsoft-cake-20-for-firefox-3/
IE team sends a cake :-O
Reply
Jason Stiles said 10:58AM on 6-18-2008
TUAW seems to scroll really slowly in FF3... Kind of sucks.... Not noticing this on other sites
Reply
Thom Brooks said 10:04AM on 6-18-2008
http://tinyurl.com/5xqv59
Reply
schölli said 10:16AM on 6-18-2008
It seems that Firefox 3 is not supported on some websites ;)
I just searched for some iphone accessoires...and yeah..speck products advises me to use firefox 2 instead of 3...
http://escssrv002.host.pc4u.at/media/firefox3outofdate.png
Reply
Dale said 10:20AM on 6-18-2008
It uses Growl! I was not aware of that. So far, the only casualty is FireBug.
Reply
Dannel said 10:28AM on 6-18-2008
maybe, instead on focusing on giving Firefox a facelift, they should focus on maintaining plugin compatibility.
Also, am I the only one who hates the new AwesomeBar (the FF3 location bar)? I really don't like how it behaves, in previous betas I could disable the new behavior but it seems they took that away now. :/
I spent a couple hours on the #firefox IRC channel trying to fix this but nothing.
Reply
paul merrill said 11:24AM on 6-18-2008
The download worked fine. The browser works fine.
The only bug I found is that it somehow loaded up my set of bookmarks that was maybe a month old. (Strange!)
Reply
Ryan Trevisol said 10:55AM on 6-18-2008
Thank god for the return of Adblock!
Reply
fishbert said 11:07AM on 6-18-2008
FF3RC3 hasn't told me there is an update available, so no download for lazy ol' me. Or, perhaps FF3RC3 = FF3?
Reply
Scott said 12:14PM on 6-18-2008
Has anyone run across a theme for FF3 that makes it look like FF2 for the Mac? I know lots of purists like the FF3 look, but I want Firefox to look like Firefox, not Safari. I hate the all-gray look.
Reply