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Archived entry | Matt Wilcox .net

The botched launch of Firefox 3

The much anticipated release of the third version of the best browser in the world didn’t go particularly smoothly.

A lot of planning has gone into the launch day, including an attempt to set a world record for the most downloads of an application in 48hrs. However, despite what must have been months of preparation, the launch went anything but smoothly. At 5pm GMT the final version of Firefox 3 was supposed to be available. It’s now 10:20pm GMT and only now is mozilla.com reachable (with a nice new design), for the last five hours their servers have been hammered so hard that nothing at all was being served up. I did manage to get through to mozilla-europe a few hours ago, which proudly announced the availability of FF3 along with a download button with the FF3 logo. Sadly it pointed to the FF2 download. And even now that mozilla.com is resolving, and the new design is live, the download button there is also pointing to FF2

To get FF3, follow this link straight to the download page.

It’s 10:30 and the download button is now pointing to FF3. Also, at 14,000 downloads per minute, I think I can forgive mozilla for buckling under the strain. That’s truly phenomenal.

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