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Download Day: The perils of shooting for a world record

Firefox down
So you may have heard that Mozilla is hoping to set a world record for the most software downloads in a single day today. The company has been hyping today as "Download Day" for about a week. But a more apt name might be "Down Day." That's because GetFirefox.com is down. As in dead, kaput, service unavailable.

This probably shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but if you encourage millions of users to download your software on the same day, your servers are going to take a hammering. But it appears that even Mozilla had no idea how many people would be trying to download Firefox 3 today.

There's a good chance that you may get through if you keep hitting refresh. And there's a good chance that the company will manage to break the world record if it ever gets the servers back up. But you know what? If you don't really care about setting a world record, Firefox 3 RC 3 is pretty much identical to Firefox 3 final. So if you're already running RC2 or RC3, there's no need to kill yourself trying to update your browser today. Tomorrow, next week, or even next month will probably be soon enough.

In the meantime, if you've got your heart set on downloading a next-generation browser, you can always take Opera 9.5 for a spin. That company's servers are holding up just fine.

Update: Some users are reporting success with these download links. Windows, Mac, Linux

Update 2: It looks like the site is back up, but incredibly slow. Like dialup slow.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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