About two weeks ago we wrote about how Mozilla was going after a Guinness World Record when Firefox 3 launched. Well, that day is today, and the official Firefox 3 Download Day started just minutes ago! It strolled in about an hour late, but at least it made it here safe and sound. The site is getting hammered pretty hard right now, so don’t be surprised if you can’t get through right away.
Mozilla is shooting for 5 million downloads within the first 24-hours, and to have your download count you’ll need to download the full installation of the browser. You’ve got until Wednesday, June 18th at 10AM PST (view in your timezone) to complete your download.
Before the launch there had already been well over 1.7 million people pledge to download the browser, which means they should have no troubles bypassing the 1.6 million downloads that they received for Firefox 2 when it was released. Italy, Poland, and Brazil all had over 100,000 pledges each, and the United States had over 275,000 pledges. That means those four countries alone will likely account for 40% of the total downloads.
In the event that Mozilla’s site starts to get bogged down (which is exactly what appears to be happening right now) I’ve put together a downloader for all of the different languages Firefox 3 is offered in. This will take you directly to the download page for your particular language, and should count in the “Download Day” total.
Be sure to keep an eye out for our CyberNotes tomorrow morning as we give Firefox 3 the full review it deserves.
Get Firefox 3
Thanks to Cody for the tip!
OMG.. even the download page is down… damn.. I think they’ll beat up the record in 48 hours because in the first 24 the site will be down
)
Well all attempts to get Firefox 3 are ending with not being able to get it. Apparently Mozilla did not have the smarts to ensure they had the bandwidth set for their record attempt. Their service is unavailable and continues to be unavailable. At this rate, I expect they will not get anywhere near their goal, nor set a record.
Your links do not work either as they point to Mozilla’s site which is unavailable.
Heres the download counter so far.
[downloadcounter.sj.mozilla.com]
Of course the question everybody has been asking since Download Day began is: how on earth did they not increase their server capacity, after so many pledges???
Yeah, I was waiting to post the article until Mozilla got the traffic under control. It was looking promising because I was able to get through and download Firefox 3 without any troubles. So I thought I would post it now, and then they collapsed again. This reminds me of Ubuntu one or two years ago who couldn’t serve up the operating system fast enough, but their files were much larger. I can’t believe Mozilla couldn’t prepare for this in some way.
If you just want to download it you can grab it from Filehippo or something:
[filehippo.com]
That, of course, doesn’t count towards the download record but you could always download it again later on from Mozilla if they ever get their act together.
Wow, it’s crazy how many people are actually able to get through!
No kidding… 1.7 million pledges. They had to assume that they would get a million of those hits within the first one to two hours.
Mozilla is back up, and you can digg the release notes here:
[digg.com]
Their release notes page is themed with a new style, just like the rest of the Mozilla site. Enjoy.
Looks like you’re right. The Spread Firefox site is still going pretty darn slow though, and the actual Firefox site sometimes returns an error where it can’t display the page.
SpreadFirefox is still down, but the new Mozilla.com looks cool.
Very awkward. So much marketing for the Firefox 3 & Mozilla is down almost all time in this big day. They want to enter in guinness book of records? Are they sure?
Ryan, I used your link to download Firefox 3 and everything worked as expected. It worked like a normal day. If this trend continues, I’m sure The Mozilla Development Team will fulfill their dream.
I take this opportunity to thank you and Ashley for all your support at CyberNet News. I’ve adopted it to be my Number One destination.
P.S.: I’m writing this comment on Tuesday, June 17th. at 19:16 (GMT).
Thanks Omar! We really appreciate regular visitors and commenters like yourself. The community we’ve built here is rather remarkable, and it makes writing the articles worth it.
Hi all.
I did sucseed in downloading&instaling the F3 but i had to many crashes
so i reinstaled the 2.0.14.To bad .I`m disapointed …but maybe over few days they gonna fix that.Unill then i`ll be surfing with older version of FF.
GreetZ all ZeroOne
To all of you who can not download FF3 from above mentiond links here , you have also the torrent sites wher you can get FF3.
GreetZ all ZeroOne
I’d upgrade but I have 30 extensions that I know wouldn’t work so I’m stuck with 2.0.0.14.
Revenge of the Netscape!!
I wonder if the IE team will send them a cake this time too 
After downloading Firefox 3, I found out that five out of twelve extensions are not working.
Even as we speak, The Mozilla Team might be working on them. I’ll try every day to see which ones are upgraded. No big deal, the most important ones are the ones that worked.
The default theme looks very cool. At this moment, I don’t perceive a speed improvement. I’ll keep on using FX 3 the rest of the day. Flock will have to wait for a while.
Download and Install – Download hit 7kb at one point – AfterInstall i started with a new profile when a major new verison comes out e.g. Firefox 1, Firefox 2, Firefox 3 as then i can look through which add-ons to reinstall its down to 3:
Adblock Plus (Custom Ad Filter e.g. whitelist such websites like cybernet news, Hot UK Deals , BBC etc…)
Reliby (Auto-update all RSS Feeds in Firefox)
Webmail Notifier (Auto check gmail,WLM.)
screw that. get opera
Anyone else having problems where mouse clicks don’t work for things like the toolbar or bookmarks?
Way to go Mozilla…good job!
I downloaded it at about 1:01PM EST from their FTP Site, took a while to get in and had to hammer it hard…, actually they built the installer on the 11th of June, FTP is working really fast now again, although this most likely won’t count on the hit counter. At first I thought I downloaded the wrong thing cause when i Loaded it said RC3, but then an hour later it automatically changed…
Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump!
Tell me I’m not the only one who knows what that means.
I didn’t have any problems dl’ing FF3 from the firefox site around 2-3pm CST.
I’m surprised that more features of Tab Mix Plus weren’t integrated into FF3… fortunately the latest dev version (available from the creators site) works fine. Now if I can only find another “Element Resizer” script for greasemonkey I’ll be o.k. — for now.
The list of not compatible extensions/scripts for me are:
Better YouTube script, Linkification, All In One Sidebar (I guess this one is probably done for.>, and some problems with BetterSearch script.
That’s on my laptop… my desktop has a few more non-working extensions. But right now.. I’ve got to find an “Element Resizer” or I’ll go crazy!
Also to note many add-ons waited till to day to be compatible with Firefox 3. (as apposed to the release candidates)
Celtics=Champions
Downloaded the british english version from their ftp site. hope this counts as a download.
If you’re just trying to upgrade from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 then you might want to start with a clean profile. There’s likely something incompatible in your profile that is causing the crashes. I haven’t had Firefox 3 crash on me in months.
They sure did!
Nope, I’ve been using pre-release versions for months and have never had a problem like that. You might want to try disabling some extensions to see if that solves the problem.
I think that Mozilla just wants to keep the browser simple, and will not add a bunch of the advanced features Tab Mix Plus includes.
Nope, if you downloaded from the FTP that doesn’t count.
Keep it simple? LOL… that was a good one Ryan!