Something has gone terribly wrong …

Posted by Greg Laden on June 17, 2008
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… at Firefox Central.

Firefox had been organizing “Download Day” on their web site … getting as many people as possible to show up TODAY (June 17th) todownload the newly released Firefox 3 … so many people as to set a record for number of downloads.

But it isn’t there! Ha! You can download Version 2, but not Version 3. Maybe they mean some other time zone… Maybe they were only kidding… Maybe they messed up….

i-f06302d7ea0e62f71f9e3b9bcd6a0bea-firefox_download_oops.jpg

Well, the Firefox Browser is so good we’ll forgive them. Maybe they will get he software on line in a few minutes or an hour or so and still break the record.

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Comments

  1. #1 unicow
    June 17, 2008

    According to their blog, it starts at 10 AM PDT.

    Though I agree it seems odd that they wouldn’t start it at midnight UTC or something.

  2. #2 Oldfart
    June 17, 2008

    I like Firefox but I wouldn’t call it the best browser ever. Mine crashes every fifth day or so. And will not function for certain web sites. And occasionally locks up on me. Even so, I prefer it to other browsers.

  3. #3 Greg Laden
    June 17, 2008

    OF: You are having some kind of problem, that’s for sure. Are you running this on Windows?

  4. #4 Bob O'H
    June 17, 2008

    I found v3 last week, but it was a bit of a search. I can’t remember where it was down the back of the sofa perhaps.

  5. #5 Yttrai
    June 17, 2008

    I adored FF too, for years, but i switched to Camino about 6 months ago. I tried FF 3 beta but it was almost worse than 2.5 – it crashes before it finishes opening, usually, and when it’s open i can’t use any other programs due to the psychedelic spinning wheel of death.

    (This is on a mac.)

    That said, i’m grateful to the Mozilla people in general. I can accept that my machine isn’t happy with FF, but it sure likes Thunderbird and it ADORES Sunbird. Camino is a Mozilla product, too, so 3/4 isn’t a bad record.

    After the brouhaha dies down i’ll try FF 3.0 and see if the GUI errors are minimized or not.

  6. #6 Stephanie Z
    June 17, 2008

    I have Firefox problems on a Mac too, but I suspect that many of them would go away if I didn’t leave it open all the time. But there are all these tabs, see, that I haven’t had time to get to yet or still need to do something with….

  8. #8 Virgil Samms
    June 17, 2008

    They might be live now, I can’t even get to their site. Maybe I’ll just go on vacation for a week and try it out when i get back.

  9. #9 unicow
    June 17, 2008

    Well, now something really has gone wrong.

    Apparently everyone trying to download the new version has resulted in their servers crapping out. If only there was some way they could have seen this coming!

  10. #10 Carlie
    June 17, 2008

    It’s a little after 2pm eastern, and I can get to the download site, but I click on “Download Firefox 3 now” and it redirects me to the firefox 2 download. ?

  11. #11 llewelly
    June 17, 2008

    hm, my firefox usually runs for a month or more between crashes… oh wait, I’m still using 2.0.0.4 … that’s why I’m not experiencing all the trouble some folk are reporting.

  12. #12 Stephanie Zvan
    June 17, 2008

    Well, whatever problems they may have been having earlier, they’re fine now. I couldn’t have asked for a faster download.

  13. #13 Greg Laden
    June 17, 2008

    My linux distro automatically updates firefox. I doubt we’ll go to 3.0 for a while. Let everybody else test it first.

  14. #14 Stephanie Z
    June 17, 2008

    Ben’s already been testing it for me. Different machine but same OS, so unless they really screwed something up coming out of beta….

  15. #15 Virgil Samms
    June 17, 2008

    My linux distro automatically updates firefox. I doubt we’ll go to 3.0 for a while.

    My Linux distro shipped with Firefox 3.0b5. That “b” as in beta. I definitely have some problems. I’m hoping they squashed must of those bugs.

  16. #16 Greg Laden
    June 17, 2008

    What was that distro, Gentoo????

  17. #17 themadlolscientist, Firefox junkie
    June 17, 2008

    I finally got through! It’s DLing really slow (10-15k/sec), but it’s chugging along. Now all I have to do is DL the Windoze version for my tech-impaired buddy.

    There is a Linux version listed here, BTW.

    As for the crashing – I seem to have fixed that problem with FF2.0.0.14 on my Mac by emptying the cache regularly. I wonder if increasing the cache size will help too.

  18. #18 Courtney
    June 17, 2008

    It was the latest Ubuntu release that shipped a beta of Firefox 3. The reasoning behind it was that it’s a “long term support” release, which is going to be supported for three years on the desktop version (five on the server version), and they didn’t want to have to deal with patches to Firefox 2 for years down the road.

  19. #19 themadlolscientist
    June 17, 2008

    Just passed 3,000,000 DLs!

  20. #20 themadlolscientist
    June 18, 2008

    7.3 million and counting, with a little over 2 hours to go. And they were shooting for 5 million.