Some Thoughts on Firefox 3.0 Download Record
First of all, let me clarify a simple point that you need to have in your mind when reading this post: neither I’m a fan of Internet Explorer nor a fan of Firefox! I have used both and never preferred one to another!
What I’m going to write about in this post is what you have heard about it in the past few weeks: Firefox 3.0 download record!
In this simple blog post I don’t want to talk about technical aspects of this browser and never want to challenge the excellent quality of the software!
Sometimes such a disclaimer can save my time from deleting some comments!
To be honest the huge noise around Firefox 3.0 download was one the silly things that I’ve ever heard! You may have a different opinion maybe with logical reasons behind it but as I couldn’t find logical reasons, I think that it’s been a silly noise! In my opinion fun is also something very different than this!
Now that the noise is gone let’s review the past few weeks! Mozilla started a program to promote its popular web browser by adding the Firefox 3.0 downloads number to Guiness records. They also asked their fans and followers to organize meetings and parties for this release around the globe! They asked users to enter their email addresses in order to promise to download this browser in the first 24 hours to help get the record! And of course, they did many other things to promote their browser!
I have no discussion about this stuff. They chose this way to promote their products and their fans helped them even though there are many points to challenge this process like the fact that Guiness record book is not this important and many of these meetings were just for fun and not for the software and could be held for many other things! However, I don’t want to bother everyone for being happy for something as I’m happy that all these guys been happy!
But my question is about the accuracy of the downloads number. This is challenged by many other guys before me but it seems that this important point is lost in this huge noise!
I have no doubt that Firefox 3.0 has had many many downloads in the first 24 hours but the actual number should be much different from this. Many guys have challenged this record by pointing to automated download bots and multiple downloads by single clients and these all seem to be true! Of course, Mozilla has rejected this and has announced that they have calculated their numbers based on single downloads from each machine but it seems that they’re lying or maybe they have done something wrong in their methods (this is very possible because they had some mistakes in predicting their demand in the first 24 hours)!
One of the main challenging countries in the records is my homeland with over 480,000 downloads at the time of writing! This country doesn’t have this number of active internet users and more specifically it doesn’t have this number of guys who may know about Firefox or even have any interest to download it! Being upper than India, China or Canada is surprising! What makes me suspicious is some attempts around this achievement to connect a simple downloads record to the national and heroic stuff (WTF)!!
Mozilla guys never could predict such a huge request from users in the first 24 hours so couldn’t handle it but their prediction was true unless the fact that there are some guys who are trying to cheat!
To me it sounds like that some guys around the globe have been trying to cheat the system and they have been success! I know that doing this in a country can’t prove that this is done in all other countries to challenge the overall statistics but the point is a hole in the statistics and this point disturbs the whole accuracy of results. As long as some guys could cheat this system, any other guy could do this as well hence it makes sense to reject the accuracy of the overall downloads number!
What puts smiley in my face is the stupidity of some guys who spent time and effort to cheat this system. Whether Mozilla and Firefox get the record or not what could they get from this? I really doubt they’re not crazy!
Some guys think that Microsoft is an enemy and anything that competes with Microsoft is a friend (Google, Apple, Mozilla or …)! What a wrong imagination since all these today’s friends can be a second Microsoft for their own someday! Always worry about this!
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1 Comment : 06.20.08
#1
A.mouse
06.25.2008 @ 3:38 PM
... I'm on windows OSX for me the download from mozilla.com was corrupted, I tried downloading it about 3 times before I gave up, when I came back later it worked and the DMG loaded succesfully... I wonder if this was on purpose.