Firefox 3 launch firing on all cylinders after early stumble

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 05:04

Business IT - Open Source

The debut of Firefox 3 on Tuesday morning (US time) ran into a slight hitch, but it's now full steam ahead to establish a world record for the number of downloads of one program in a 24 hour period.

The launch was scheduled for around 10am Pacific Daylight Time, but the level of interest caught Mozilla on the hop. Scalability, or a lack of it, is a recurring problem on the web. It's often seen on e-commerce sites when tickets for extremely popular events or ridiculously cheap air fares go on sale.

"Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly," said Mozilla's Melissa Shapiro in the organisation's blog at 10.39am.

The download record period officially began at 11.16am. In four hours, more than 1.5 million copies had been downloaded, which bodes well for the attempt.

Since there is no existing Guinness world record for downloads, there is no specific number that must be reached. Organisers were hoping to at least exceed the 1.6 million downloads of Firefox 2 on its launch day, and that was reached in five hours.

The more optimistic target of 5 million also seems achievable.

"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," said Mozilla's Paul Kim in the organisation's blog at 3.26pm.

Where is demand coming from? The answer is on page 2 .