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Pints of Guinness all 'round! 8.3 million Firefox 3 downloads

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

June 18, 2008, 5:23 PM

Download Firefox 3.0 Final Release for Windows from FileForum now.

The early estimates from the Mozilla organization show its servers (when they were up and running) cranked out enough bytes to cover 11.07 million downloads of Firefox 3.0, and were registering as many as 283 downloads per second.

Server admins, do not try this at home. The 24-hour downloading extravaganza for Firefox 3.0 closed up shop yesterday with nearly 2.58 million downloads from the US alone, almost 663,000 from Germany, 403,000 from Japan, 295,000 from the UK, and 290,000 from France.

Since the 1:00 pm EDT download period closed, that number has kept rising. By 5:10 pm EDT this afternoon, SpreadFirefox.com (the organization's marketing arm) reported 9,026,760 downloads worldwide, with 2,754,008 in the US, 784,234 in Germany, 242,265 in Canada, and 17 in Turkmenistan.

What does this mean in terms of turnover; how is FF3 affecting the Internet? According to a Net Applications report, by 4:00 pm EDT Wednesday afternoon, 3.38% of all the world's Web browsers were putting out HTTP requests that identified themselves as Firefox 3. That's down from a peak of 4.3% recorded at 9:00 pm EDT this morning.

A dispatch sent by Mozilla to BetaNews this afternoon reports its servers gave out about 83 terabytes of data in the 24-hour period, with one mirror sending data at speeds of 20 Gbps.

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By merlin666

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 5:18 PM

Strangely enough, Firefox 2.00.14 does not recognize an available update! It would be much easier to do this via the update button.

Score: 0

By midnighter_9999

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 4:52 PM

"Server admins, do not try this at home."

LOL!~ PAWNED!~

Score: 0

By Morsel

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 2:00 PM

Beautiful this version 3! Congrats Mozilla! This is a great achievement for the open source community.

Score: 0

By Daddy_Spank

edited Jun 19, 2008 - 4:30 AM

What concerns me more than some guinness record is the fact that less than a day after the software was released, a security vulnerability was found.

Score: 0

By preinterpost

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 8:39 AM

You should be glad they did find it...

Score: 0

By Prixsel

edited Jun 19, 2008 - 5:12 AM

Yes , all those bug fixes and now people are concerned about 1 more security vulnerability what was posted by anonymous to get some cash out of the report >>> http://dvlabs.tippingpoi...y-in-mozilla-firefox-30
So it was already fixed by latest Firefox 2.0.14 but 3.0 is still vulnerable...
Just get yourself virus protection and firewall cause when you don't trust that a lot of bad sites are actually blocked by Firefox or IE...

Score: 0

By Daddy_Spank

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 4:02 PM

I am glad to see that firefox users dont care about security vulnerabilities... but I thought that was exactly the biggest selling factor for firefox vs IE no? that IE doesnt care about security? OH and if you read the whole report it says it affects firefox 3.0 and also 2.0.x.

"What we can confirm is that about five hours after the official release of Firefox 3.0 on June 17th, our Zero Day Initiative program received a critical vulnerability affecting Firefox 3.0 as well as prior versions of Firefox 2.0.x."

But, of course, just install virus protection and firewall and dont worry too much about browser security. Right?

Score: 0

By slinkys_delsol

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 11:27 PM

I'll take mine in "Car-Bomb" form!

Score: 0

By Straspey

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 10:19 PM

I'm curious if they will count the number of people who downloaded and installed FF 3.0 and then decided to revert back to 2.0.0.14 (as I did) due to one or more complications and a general sense of disappointment in how many of the newer features in 3.0 do not come with options for configuring and/or simply turning them off...such as in the case with the new complicated address bar.

On the Mozillazine forums, there are many threads from long-time FF users who are quickly downgrading back to 2.0 and looking for places to download the FF 2.0 Setup File.

I was really looking forward to this and have now decided to wait for the next upgrade, which may take a few months.

Oh well....

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 9:00 AM

complicated address bar.

Type in address. Hit enter.

Yeah, I can see how you would find that difficult. ;)

The cruft can be easily ignored (or even useful).

That said, Filehippo should have every version of Firefox available (Google: "Filehippo firefox").

Score: 0

By yountmj

posted Jun 20, 2008 - 1:18 AM

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ :)

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jun 20, 2008 - 8:50 AM

Do not suggest alternatives to FileHippo. I will be forced to hunt you down.

...just sayin'. ;)

Score: 0

By Straspey

edited Jun 20, 2008 - 9:56 AM

I posted the link to FileHippo on the Mozillazine FF Support forum, only to have my wrist slapped (gently) by one of the moderators there who removed the link and instructed me to rely only on "official" releases from the bona fide Mozilla ftp sites and to avoid "third party" sources where one can never be sure what one is really getting.

I guess it's true...no good deed goes unpunished.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jun 20, 2008 - 12:57 PM

Heh...

True dat.

Score: 0

By Straspey

edited Jun 19, 2008 - 10:10 AM

File Hippo indeed has every earlier version and I was able to dl 2.0.0.14 easily.

The new address bar maintains a comprehensive list of recently-visited sites and bookmarks, which are NOT cleaned by running the "Clear Private Data" tool.

Some people, like myself, find this troubling for various reasons, with privacy being one of the major issues. Fixes have already been discovered by accessing the "about:config" menu, however there are still other issues, such as the 50mb database which FF 3.0 compiles to run its anti-threat function and increased usage of HDD and memory.

I have no doubt some of these issues will be addressed in future versions and for the moment I will be happy to stick with 2.0 while waiting for this, along with the add-on developers to publish updates compatible with 3.0

No arguments here...just my POV.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 12:32 PM

To each his own, I suppose. I know I'd hate to be in the position that 50MB would concern me overmuch, especially given the additional security.

*shrug*

i lucked out on the plugin aspect. All of mine transferred without a hitch.

Score: 0

By soccerextreme

edited Jun 19, 2008 - 12:11 PM

After you "Clear Private Data" it may appear that the address bar still contains history... but it DOES NOT. It will though still contain whatever bookmarks you still have either on the toolbar or in your regular bookmarks folder.

I suggest becoming familiar with the browser for more than 24 hours before your start criticizing it.

Score: 0

By preinterpost

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 8:43 AM

There are always people who have difficulty dealing with change. FF2 was a crap piece of software, tolerated only by anti-MSFT sentiment. FF3 however is a very tight product, efficient and a pleasure to work with (as far as browsers go...)

Score: 0

By The MAZZTer

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 11:42 PM

All they did is count the number of downloads, and it stopped tracking there. They probably even counted aborted/canceled downloads.

Usually you count downloads by having the download link load a page which counts your page load as a download, then gives you that actual download, it can't keep track of if you cancel the actual download or not. This is what BetaNews does.

Score: 0

By Secret Agent Man

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 9:22 PM

This time there actually was cake.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 8:58 AM

*groans*

Portal, as I understand it, wasn't really all that popular. Why is this joke?

Score: 0

By jafo818

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 7:54 PM

I looked at 11:16 PDT and it was 8.29 million... It was 8.3 million at 11:17 PDT. :)

Score: 0

By BklynKid

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 7:36 PM

I don't like this Firefox. It's slow in everything except loading pages.

Safari is a lot snappier for me.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

edited Jun 19, 2008 - 12:33 PM

It's slow in everything except loading pages.

...so....it does what it was meant to do...really well?

I really want to know what you use your browser for.

Most of us use them to...load web pages.

Score: 0

By soccerextreme

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 12:42 PM

I wonder if this is coming from a Mac user? Sounds like it could be the same old argument of why IE load faster for a Windows user and Safari load faster for a Mac user. Well maybe because they are integrated into the OS!?!?

If not then I would have to agree that it would only be because of the lack of anti phishing, anti spyware, etc. support for Safari so it loads less into the memory.

The funny thing is that the latest version of Safari should be slightly faster than even the new Firefox 3.0 with regards to it Javascript Engine (Its speed ability to load many types of web pages). So even the "Firefox loads web pages faster" wouldn't be correct. Unless you have an out of date Safari.

Anyways... do some research before posting.

Score: 0

By siryak

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 12:23 AM

Safari snappier?! Maybe if you are talking about the Wildlife kind of Safari lol.

Score: 0

By bousozoku

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 11:06 PM

It happens, but that's generally because Safari is missing things like anti-phishing support, extension support, anti-malware support, etc.

Firefox 3 is both faster for me and more compatible on my 3 year old PowerBook than Safari ever has been.

Score: 0

By dvferret

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 8:28 PM

Dude, sorry but from what ive tested, safari sucks.

Score: 0

By GhoS

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 6:28 PM

Hmm ok which is it? It says 8.3 million in the title, then 11.07 in the 1st paragraph and 9 million later in the article. The figures are not even close.

Score: 0

By zenarcher

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 8:05 PM

Actually, it's fairly clear, if you read the article. The 24 hour download period ran from 1:00 P.M. (EDT) on June17th, through 1:00 P.M. (EDT) June 18th. Therein lies the 8.3 million figure. As stated in the article, the 9 million plus figure was as of 5:10 P.M. (EDT), which is 4 hours and 10 minutes after the record count period had ended. Just an update to the present time.

As for the 11 million figure, the number of bytes cranked out...would include partial or incomplete downloads, which were not tallied in official count.

Score: 0

By The MAZZTer

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 11:45 PM

Or people who downloaded directly from mirrors while mozilla.com was down instead of waiting for it to get back up so it could count their download.

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

edited Jun 18, 2008 - 6:23 PM

The thing that really confuses me is that they're trying to set the record for the largest number of people to download a single file in one day.

All the variations of languages of Firefox are seperate files and are naturally different sizes.

Surely they don't count as a single file?

Score: 0

By zenarcher

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 8:31 PM

Quoted from the Firefox website:

"Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours - it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.

The official date for the launch of Firefox 3 is June 17, 2008. Join our community and this effort by pledging today."

I see nothing on the official website about downloading a SINGLE file in one day.

Score: 0

By dvferret

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 12:22 PM

Appears we were wrong then but we still have to wait for Guiness's official say.

Score: 0

By dvferret

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 8:28 PM

Oh, nice point!

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

edited Jun 18, 2008 - 5:58 PM

Where's my pint of Guinness?

Post it to me, now.

Score: 0

By preinterpost

posted Jun 19, 2008 - 8:45 AM

http://www.ibabuzz.com/b...7/07/guinness-draft.jpg

Score: 0

By yountmj

posted Jun 20, 2008 - 1:22 AM

Now that's some good head!

Score: 0

By AsianAngel

posted Jun 18, 2008 - 5:43 PM

Way to go Firefox!!! ^__^

Score: 0

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