8 Million Downloads of Firefox 3...And Crashing?

by Jarrett Martineau | June 18, 2008 at 01:17 pm

733 views | 25 Recommendations | 9 comments

Apparently 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded yesterday, but I guarantee that no more than 7,999,999 are satisfied customers. I was one of those pre-emptively enthusiastic technophiles to nab a copy as soon as the Mozilla servers had finished their early hours of continual crashing but, after Day 1 of use, I have to admit that I'm less than impressed. Although the browser speeds seems to have been marginally improved, I'm not sold on the look, feel, flavour, and flow of the design and user interface.

Have you downloaded it? What do you think of this Guiness record-breaking, 'browser-to-end-all-browsers'?

Take this statistic with a grain of salt, but Mozilla said more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

Mozilla, which is behind the open-source Web browser, was trying to set a download record for the software. The 24-hour period lasted from 11:16 a.m. PDT Tuesday to the same time Wednesday, and Mozilla said it's waiting for the Guinness Book of World Records to review the results.

Mozilla showed more than 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded in its first 24 hours online.

(Credit: Mozilla)
The download rate, which peaked at 14,000 per minute Tuesday, was still going strong at more than 6,000 per minute Wednesday morning.

UPDATE | 03:15pm -- And, lo! Firefox 3's first vulnerability hath been exposed!

Less than one day after its launch, Firefox 3 has a vulnerability.

According to Tipping Point's Zero Day Initiative, the vulnerability, which it rates as critical, was reported within the first five hours of Firefox 3's release.

"Once the vulnerability was verified in TippingPoint's DVLabs and acquired from the researcher, the vulnerability was promptly reported to the Mozilla security team," said a representative.

Although the Zero Day Initiative team does not offer specifics until the vendor has a chance to patch it, the blog post did say this vulnerability, which also affects Firefox 2, requires user interaction and could result in an attacker executing arbitrary code.

Mozilla is reported to be working on a fix.

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Rhonda J Mangus

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 15:43 on June 18th, 2008

Jarrett Martineau, I like this story. It's good stuff.

altrugon

at 16:00 on June 18th, 2008

I like Firefox and I think is the best browser in the market right now, however I have to admit that I also found some "crash" in my day of use and I have to downgrade to Firefox 2.

The issues that I found were add-ons related and not the browser it self, but this are things that always happen with the new release. Let's put an example ... mmmm let me think ... oh yeah, Windows Vista. More than a year in the market and still crashing :D

neclimdul

at 20:30 on June 18th, 2008

Yeah, I've been loving Firefox 3 for a while now. AJAX heavy apps like Gmail and Zimbra are so much nicer.

Congrats Firefox team and hope you enjoyed you blue cake!

Barry ORegan

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 21:56 on June 18th, 2008

Jarrett Martineau, I like this story. It's good stuff. Well Jarrett, I'll wait a few months to go by before attempting, Thanks for the tip

René

at 21:59 on June 18th, 2008

Mine wouldn't even open.

everchanging

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 22:20 on June 18th, 2008

Jarrett Martineau, Interesting, I hope they get the guinness record. I know microsoft would never get that many downloads in a day unless it had a major virus or security issue.

I always wait before downloading new software especially the day of its release. I have a mac - I wonder if that vulnerability would be the same on a mac as a PC? Does anyone know.

Mohamed Faizar Ali

at 22:23 on June 18th, 2008

Guinness World Record with our own personalized Firefox 3 Download Day certificate

I like Firefox and I think is the best browser in the market right now....

Mohamed Faizar Ali has contributed a photo to this story.

sikosis

at 00:57 on June 19th, 2008

I'd been using Firefox 3.0 since Beta 3 with it's lots of crashes, through to Beta 5 - more stable and that dog RC1, where it crashed so often, I though about going back to Beta 5, but I decided to wait for Gold. Since getting 3.0, it's certainly been fine, more refined in some areas, I've had 2 crashes so far which isn't too bad - thankfully Session Saving is built-in, otherwise I would have switched to something else long ago.

One thing I didn't like was that Firefox feeds off of Internet Explorer's settings - I found that the Zones were blocking me from doing certain things in Firefox. I found this to be a terrible feature.

There are also a lot of add-ons and themes that don't work at the moment, and this is a turnoff to those users who have become attached to their fav add-ons. We can only hope people pester the developers to fix what needs to be fixed :). Also, it would be nice if Mozilla could have a better filtering system on their web site, so that it detects what version of Firefox you are using and then only shows you what's available - reason is, I went through so many pages and pages trying to find some themes that worked.

In saying all this, it's better than Firefox 2.0, because of the memory leakage it suffered. All and all, 3.0 is still good browser, they just didn't prepare very well and I think that, is a little unsettling.

sikosis has contributed a photo to this story.