Bloggers: Why throw a wet blanket on FireFox?

The WSJ, TechCrunch-WaPo, CNET, TechSpot, PCWorld and the rest of the peanut gallery are chuckling at Mozilla today after the company had trouble keeping up with all the demand for FireFox 3.0 on its self-proclaimed worldwide "Download Day," the object of which is to set a Guinness record for the largest number of downloads in one 24-hour period.

Well, I'm here to tell you that, after only two tries, I got my shiny fresh copy of the 'Fox, and my download took only about 10 seconds. Rumors of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder why the temptation to jump on Mozilla's back for a couple of minor technical glitches in what is, after all, a commendably ambitious and successful publicity campaign. Have we bloggers forgotten that Mozilla has been giving us a top-notch browser for years now -- for free? Considering all that, you'd think the blogosphere could return the favor and give these guys a 45-minute grace period to figure out a server tweak or two before we pilloried them. 

From all the jeering, you'd think it was a piece of cake to rig up enough servers to support tens of thousands of simultaneous downloads, when even the biggest online retailers in the world can't do it.  I can't say my hands are clean when it comes to shamelessly bashing the good-faith efforts of others, but it's nice to have a reminder about how easy it is to win a sword fight with a chainsaw.