On second thought, don't help Firefox set a record

Some software experts have long warned customers not to buy anything from Microsoft until version 3.0, by which time most of the bugs are vanquished.

Evidently there also have been a fair number of folks waiting for version 3.0 of Firefox, the free open-source Web browser that is the biggest challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The latest edition is faster, more secure and has other improvements.

More than 3 million people downloaded Firefox 3 today in the first few hours it was available, including some drawn by the Mozilla Foundation's well-publicized attempt to set a world record for most downloads in a 24-hour period (actually, to establish one; Guinness doesn't have a current record holder.)

But in the be-careful-what-you-wish-for department, the traffic exceeded the nonprofit group's expectations and crashed the servers, rendering the download site unavailable for hours. As a temporary measure, Mozilla rolled back the clock and started re-offering Firefox 2.

As of this writing, though, Firefox 3 is once again open for business. 

-- Joseph Menn

Firefox logo courtesy of the Mozilla Foundation

Comments

[AySz88]

Actually, the 3 million was a bug with the download counter - currently, it's just 1.8 million successful downloads according to http://downloadcounter.sj.mozilla.com/ . Apparently they were late, and didn't start updating the site until they were already being flooded with traffic (which caused the changeover from 2 to 3 to go very slowly). They say there'll be an official postmortem posted sometime explaining what went wrong.