Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Firefox 3 Download Day is poop

I'm just gonna go ahead and say that this whole world-record setting thing is just dumb. A lot of people have woken up this morning to find out that firefox 3 wasn't quite up for download yet. Some are going to sleep. There's a lot of confusion when the download is even going to be available, since some say it was supposed to start at 10am, some are saying 1pm. Of course, spreadfirefox.com is down, since the servers got slashdotted, dugg and redditted at the same time.

Doesn't this whole thing remind you of line-ups for iPhones last year? It's not like you can't go into a store and just buy one today.

And how exactly are they counting downloads? One per IP? What about NATs? What if I download once at work and once at home? Does that count? Does the world record take Windows security patches into account? Do we even have the numbers for Live Messenger downloads? Picasa? Winamp? Real Player? Bonzy Buddy? Storm trojans?

For all anyone knows, the Mozilla guys could pretty much come up with whatever number they wanted and claim the world record. But somewhere along the lines, communication failed miserably and a lot of people were left disappointed with a delay they weren't expecting. And to that I ask, what's more important? The world record or the community?

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