Comments on: Firefox 3 Download Day!

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:57:23 +0000

RSS seems (to me, at least) to be very similar to e-mail, so it makes sense for me to use my e-mail program to read them.

And yes, I was aware of the lack of an existing record to break -- I even mentioned it earlier.

By the way, Firefox has now broken the four-million-download mark (as I predicted above), and is presently clocking over 11,000 new downloads a minute. I'm not sure all of those are legitimate... the US numbers seem to be several hundred thousand higher than I'd expect, compared to other countries. But given the time, it looks like it'll be safely over four million even discounting any illegitimate ones.

By: Ploni Almoni

Ploni Almoni — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:27:17 +0000

By the way, more in line with the subject of “world’s record for downloads day”, they aren’t breaking any world’s record as there never was one to begin with – they are setting one. Hence, it’s a bit of a publicity stunt. One that works though! Someone commented to me that Windows 7 probably will break Firefox’s record amongst a certain class of downloaders, if one could count torrents.

By: Ploni Almoni

Ploni Almoni — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:18:17 +0000

Twitteriffic is a good app for keeping up to date with it, really an applet that lives in the menu bar, sends alerts, and offers a box with the mini-messages in it. Useful if you’re using it as an adjunct to news feeds, which is basically all I use it for. I get a couple of CNET feeds and added the download-day firefox feed. I mostly use twitteriffic because it’s a cool, small, free, app, twitter really is an awful service and is unreliable at that. Before twitteriffic it wasn’t worth bothering with. (Traditional RSS reading doesn’t make as much sense because tweets are frequent and ethereal; which is part of why they tend to suck of course.)

By the way, someone told me about a better free RSS newsreader than Vienna, I’m using NewsFire now. I don’t think it has a Linux version though. There are some cross-platform news readers, and of course you can use various email readers, like Thunderbird or Mail.app (Apple Mail). I don’t think email programs were ever meant to be RSS feed readers, so I use a specialized tool. They are free and disk space is plentiful, even with 80 gigs on my main HD. (37 used) Linux has some RSS readers too, but some people like to use as few apps as possible I guess. Not a bad idea, actually, from some standpoints.

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:57:36 +0000

Odd, if the MD5 is identical then they couldn’t have changed anything, including the version string. You might want to confirm that you actually did get the final version, it was posted pretty late (after 3pm our time, from what I can tell).

I don’t use Twitter, I just dipped into it today to get the latest information on Firefox. If I did use it, I’d set it up as an RSS feed in Thunderbird, along with all my others.

By: Ploni Almoni

Ploni Almoni — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:38:18 +0000

OBTW, although the way twitter is usually used I despise, I use it as sort of a mini-RSS feed reader using some news feeds via twitter and an OS X only free program called “twitteriffic” that sends growl notifications (no, they aren’t aural) and has a pretty little window to read twitter messages in. This lets me see a few choice entries in blogs via twitter. (I only follow a few, so I’m not overwhelmed.)

By: Ploni Almoni

Ploni Almoni — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:33:03 +0000

You can download it for Macs via download.mozilla.com too, I forget the URL. I managed to download it from the webpage – some of those direct links don’t count towards the record. It’s actually identical to RC3, even the MD5 is reportedly the same.

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:24:59 +0000

It's available (and has been for several hours now). Our five systems have now been updated, and I've got the live update counter showing on a secondary screen while I work. The numbers are amazing! More than 7,000 downloads a minute, with a total of well over 1.6 million so far!

Mozilla was hoping for two million downloads during the first twenty-four hours. I strongly suspect they'll get more than double that, judging by the numbers they have right now.

By: Head Geek

Head Geek — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:12:41 +0000

Oops… all of the Firefox-related sites seem to have been overwhelmed by the demand. Mozilla apparently planned plenty of mirrors for the download part, but didn’t think to include their web sites.

Despite that, it looks like you can download it for Linux or Windows through these links. I’m not sure whether that’s the final 3.0 download or not (I’m listening to Air Mozilla live as I write this, but I haven’t heard anything definitive yet… “it should be out in about half an hour”).

Have fun!