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]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
6-18-2008 @ 8:10AM
TomWBrowning said...
Maybe mozilla should focus on making their browser not look like arse rather than breaking made-up download records?
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6-18-2008 @ 9:02AM
Nano said...
Whiner
6-18-2008 @ 9:53AM
Sam W said...
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.?
6-18-2008 @ 2:32PM
Jeffrey said...
Your wish is granted. :)
http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/
6-18-2008 @ 5:39PM
Sam W said...
Jeffrey...*bows down* you have made my day! Thanks so much
6-18-2008 @ 8:29AM
Think Adrian said...
Why don't they have this as an auto-download in FF2?
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6-18-2008 @ 2:26PM
quandmeme said...
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.
6-18-2008 @ 8:33AM
JKT said...
>"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.
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6-18-2008 @ 8:36AM
Squid7085 said...
Damn, did I miss something big again? I swear, I need to spend more time on the interwebs.
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6-18-2008 @ 8:39AM
Tony said...
They were still shipping RC3 as of late last night - I wonder how many got the RC3 thinking they had the final?
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6-18-2008 @ 8:39AM
Think Adrian said...
http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/06/sweet-plugin-microsoft-cake-20-for-firefox-3/
IE team sends a cake :-O
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6-18-2008 @ 10:04AM
Thom Brooks said...
http://tinyurl.com/5xqv59
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6-18-2008 @ 10:16AM
schölli said...
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
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6-18-2008 @ 10:20AM
Dale said...
It uses Growl! I was not aware of that. So far, the only casualty is FireBug.
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6-18-2008 @ 10:28AM
Dannel said...
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.
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6-18-2008 @ 10:55AM
Ryan Trevisol said...
Thank god for the return of Adblock!
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6-18-2008 @ 10:58AM
Jason Stiles said...
TUAW seems to scroll really slowly in FF3... Kind of sucks.... Not noticing this on other sites
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6-18-2008 @ 11:07AM
fishbert said...
FF3RC3 hasn't told me there is an update available, so no download for lazy ol' me. Or, perhaps FF3RC3 = FF3?
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6-18-2008 @ 11:24AM
paul merrill said...
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!)
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6-18-2008 @ 12:14PM
Scott said...
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.
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