Firefox 3, overloaded servers and a world record attempt
June 18th, 2008
Firefox 3 is out! And today the popular Spread Firefox site has set a challenge to break the world record for the most downloads in one day. And so far they’ve smashed all their expectations, 5.7 Million downloads, and they still have just under an hour left (if I’ve converted from PDT to BST correctly). I can’t help feeling though that this may have been a little marred by the strain on the Mozilla servers.
Several times this morning I’ve tried to download only to be greeted with a nicely styled “Technical Difficulties” page or, even worse, a HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable page. Not a great help to the cause. But still, they’ve certainly smashed the 1.2 Million that Firefox 2 achieved on it’s first day.
And, yes, Mozilla’s claims that Firefox is far better than Safari may not be entirely convincing but I LOVE this new version. Having used the beta and RC’s for a month or so (combined with the web developer & Firebug add-ons) Firefox is my browser of choice, and I don’t really see that changing in the near future.
My only wish is that someone would conceive of a way for me to test sites in IE6 and above without having to switch to Parallels.
