Something has gone terribly wrong ...

... 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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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.

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.

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

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.

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....

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.

By Virgil Samms (not verified) on 17 Jun 2008 #permalink

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!

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. ?

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.

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

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

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.

By Virgil Samms (not verified) on 17 Jun 2008 #permalink

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.

By themadlolscien… (not verified) on 17 Jun 2008 #permalink

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.

Just passed 3,000,000 DLs!

By themadlolscientist (not verified) on 17 Jun 2008 #permalink

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

By themadlolscientist (not verified) on 18 Jun 2008 #permalink