It is both annoying and laughable when a company massively hypes its own launch, only to result in broken links and 404 pages. As Stinger taught Maverick in Top Gun, you shouldn’t let your ego write checks that your body can’t cash. Mozilla apparently never learned from that message, and the launch of Firefox 3 has badly stumbled out of the gate.
Mozilla’s failure is actually worse than most in a couple regards. First, it is trying to set the world record for downloads of a piece of software in a day. A failure to launch cannot be good for such a goal. And second, to help achieve this record, it decided to make it so that everyone in the world download the software at the exactly same time.
Mozilla had to know its servers would get slammed around 10 AM PST (the start time), hell, it begged for it to happen. In the blogosphere, we have a word for this: FAIL.
Mozilla put a lofty 5 million number out there as a goal for downloads today. Right now it’d be happy with one.
update: The direct download links are now working. Of course, this really won’t help achieving the record as most people will have no idea how to download the software without a Mozilla webpage directing them to the link. We’ll do our part and put the links here.
You’re welcome, Mozilla.
Warning: These will start auto-downloading Firefox 3:
update 2: The main Firefox download page now appears to be working — after some truly weird redirects.
The Spreadfirefox world record download page is still down.
You’ll also notice that in the picture on the right, even thought the graphic is for Firefox 3, the version number is still 2. (Thanks Zach Landes)
update 3: It looks like Mozilla hasn’t started the counters yet for the downloads as it is overwhelmed. As soon as the site goes live is when the counting will begin. In the old days we called that “cheating.”
12:29 pm
Tiago Dória Weblog » Blog Archive » Download Day do Firefox começa com sites no chão said:
[...] às 16h20 - Mais cedo, o blog Venture Beat havia escrito um post sobre o Failfox, em referência aos servidores da Mozilla terem [...]
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FireFox 3.0 Live Stats | FOOLSVILLE 2.0 said:
[...] Failfox 3, er…Firefox 3: The race to 5 million is on, but the race to one proves difficult [via Zemanta] [...]
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D-Day Progress: 25% of My Readers Are Using Firefox 3.0| Zoli’s Blog said:
[...] Failfox 3, er…Firefox 3: The race to 5 million is on, but the race to one proves difficult [via Zemanta] [...]
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FT.com | Tech Blog | From the ‘it looked good on paper’ file said:
[...] 3 rendered the Mozilla.com site inaccessible to other users for part of the day. The cock-up drew jeers from web commentators. As Venture Beat wrote: It is both annoying and laughable when a company massively hypes its own [...]
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From the ‘it looked good on paper’ file | gadgetforlife.info said:
[...] 3 rendered the Mozilla.com site inaccessible to other users for part of the day. The cock-up drew jeers from web commentators. As VentureBeat wrote: It is both annoying and laughable when a company massively hypes its own [...]
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Firefox 3: Records are made to be set » VentureBeat said:
[...] downloads in a 24-hour period — a record, which incidentally didn’t exist — Mozilla badly botched up its start time. Users who tried to access Firefox’s site at the scheduled 10 AM PST start time were met with [...]
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I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla >> The Far Side of Tech said:
[...] At the time everyone was trying to download Firefox 3, but most were failing miserably due to Mozilla’s servers collapsing. Gray casually suggested in his tweet that we download Safari instead. I considered the thought, [...]
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Firefox 3 Goes Live, Breaks Record- Worth the Hype? : Earz Magazine said:
[...] software downloaded in a 24 hour period”- but they had to fence off such adversities as blogger smugness, and a brief server-overload crashing the download site [...]
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Mozilla’s Firefox 3 wins Guinness world software download record » VentureBeat said:
[...] Also of note: The company’s download site crashed out of the gate due to over-the-top demand, and it didn’t start counting downloads until the site came live again. [...]
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ArtistOne Analytics - Analytical Impressions » Blog Archive » Firefox 3 Download Party said:
[...] Get the original story here. [...]