... 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....
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.
Technology
Comments
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.
Posted by: unicow | June 17, 2008 8:58 AM
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.
Posted by: Oldfart | June 17, 2008 9:15 AM
OF: You are having some kind of problem, that's for sure. Are you running this on Windows?
Posted by: Greg Laden | June 17, 2008 9:16 AM
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.
Posted by: Bob O'H | June 17, 2008 9:30 AM
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.
Posted by: Yttrai | June 17, 2008 9:31 AM
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....
Posted by: Stephanie Z | June 17, 2008 10:07 AM
try this URL http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html
Posted by: oldcola | June 17, 2008 11:46 AM
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.
Posted by: Virgil Samms | June 17, 2008 1:30 PM
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!
Posted by: unicow | June 17, 2008 2:02 PM
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. ?
Posted by: Carlie | June 17, 2008 2:10 PM
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.
Posted by: llewelly | June 17, 2008 4:48 PM
Well, whatever problems they may have been having earlier, they're fine now. I couldn't have asked for a faster download.
Posted by: Stephanie Zvan | June 17, 2008 5:35 PM
My linux distro automatically updates firefox. I doubt we'll go to 3.0 for a while. Let everybody else test it first.
Posted by: Greg Laden | June 17, 2008 5:44 PM
Ben's already been testing it for me. Different machine but same OS, so unless they really screwed something up coming out of beta....
Posted by: Stephanie Z | June 17, 2008 5:48 PM
Posted by: Virgil Samms | June 17, 2008 6:17 PM
What was that distro, Gentoo????
Posted by: Greg Laden | June 17, 2008 6:22 PM
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.
Posted by: themadlolscientist, Firefox junkie | June 17, 2008 6:23 PM
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.
Posted by: Courtney | June 17, 2008 7:23 PM
Just passed 3,000,000 DLs!
Posted by: themadlolscientist | June 17, 2008 11:49 PM
7.3 million and counting, with a little over 2 hours to go. And they were shooting for 5 million.
Posted by: themadlolscientist | June 18, 2008 12:01 PM