The Mozilla Blog

Wondering what to do until we hear back from Guinness?  How about taking a moment to celebrate all the hardwork that went into Download Day and the launch of Firefox 3.  Check out Mozilla Party Central for a party near you or to host your own.

With the same enthusiasm that went into spreading the word about Download Day, the Firefox community has been planning parties with gusto!  There are over 700 parties planned worldwide. Here are some of the highlights:

• Catch a viewing of Kung Fu Panda with its director Michael Osborne in Palo Alto this Saturday.
• Fancy that Firefox 3 robot?  Come build one in Dolores Park in San Francisco on Sunday.
• The MVGeeks are planning a huge party in the Maldives on June 26th (editor’s note: the Firefox will need appropriate tropical attire stat!)
• Community members in Bucharest will be toasting Firefox 3 and the Mozilla 10-year anniversary!
• Bob Chao of MozTW will be hosting a Firefox 3 party for the Taiwan community on July 19th!

This is just a sampling…and please be reassured that it’s not too late to plan one!

Thanks to OLPC for throwing a Firefox 3 party on launch day!

We’re getting close to handing over our download logs to our judges for our Guinness World Record attempt.  We’re very lucky and honored to have Paul Vixie of the Internet Systems Consortium and Corey Shields of Indiana University.

Here is a little background on them both:

Paul Vixie has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems as a protocol designer and software architect since 1980, and was a cofounder of ISC in 1994. Early in his career, he developed and introduced SENDS, proxynet, rtty, cron and other lesser-known tools. Paul is considered the primary modern author and technical architect of BIND8, the most commonly used DNS server on the Internet.

Corey Shields is the Lead Systems Analyst for the High Performance Systems group in University Information Technology Services at Indiana University. Corey has had a long history as an open source software user,  advocate, and contributor.  He has made contributions to many open source projects including Mozilla and the Gentoo Linux distribution, and spent a couple of years managing the Open Source Lab  (OSL) at Oregon State University.

Currently, Corey is working with a team of administrators on the BigRed supercomputer at Indiana University.  BigRed is the 42nd fastest supercomputer in the world, and relies on open source software to operate and produce results for researchers across the country.

A huge thanks to them for supporting our effort!

Awesome job!  I am truly impressed by everyone’s hard work.  We exceeded 8 million downloads in our 24 hour period.  We’ll need to be patient as our judges and Guinness World Records validate our record attempt.  We’ll keep our map up and tracking downloads on Spread Firefox, but our judges will be reviewing the time period from 11:16 a.m. PDT on June 17th to 11:16 a.m. PDT on June 18th.

The Mozilla team at Download Day HQ as the attempt period wrapped! (Photo courtesy of Clare Bayley)

Update: You can catch the close of the 24-hour attempt live on Air Mozilla.

We’re at 7.8 millions downloads with just under an hour to go!  Can we break 8 million?

You can still be a part of the world record — just download Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) today.  Remember that Guinness is only counting complete downloads.   If you’re using an early version of Firefox 3, such as a beta or release candidate, you’ll need to download the new Firefox 3 to be counted.

Let’s go for the gold!

It’s been an awesome morning and afternoon here at Mozilla headquarters. We launched Firefox 3 this morning and immediately felt the love from millions of people all over the world joining us to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in 24 hours.

Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through - but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability.

To put some more color behind what’s been happening on this historic day:

• We exceeded the first day download mark for Firefox 2 of 1.6 million after just five hours of availability for Firefox 3.
• Net Applications is already reporting a 300% positive change in Firefox 3 market share worldwide just today.
• Over 500 articles about the launch were linked to from Google News
• The Firefox 3 launch made the front pages of BBC.co.uk, NYTimes.com, Liberation.fr, laRepubblica.it, Digg, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Yahoo! News
• The completely redesigned Mozilla.com launched in over 25 language versions
• New community activity on SpreadFirefox.com has skyrocketed with dozens of new groups and hundreds of new postings
• Over 700 community launch parties have been registered on mozillaparty.com

Download Day has already been an amazing demonstration of the power of the Mozilla community. Thank you to each and every one of you who’s contributed to a terrific launch of Firefox 3.

Onwards to a new World Record, together!

Attention Firefox fans:  Now is your chance to help set a Guinness World Record! We’ve already collected over 1.7 million pledges and served up several thousand Firefox 3 downloads.  Phenomenal — let’s see what the next 24 hours has in store!

To be part of the record please download Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18th.  Remember that Guinness is only counting complete downloads.   If you’re using an early version of Firefox 3, such as a beta or release candidate, you’ll need to download the new Firefox 3 to be counted.

Please help us document this history-making event with photos and videos.  Please tag images and videos with “Firefox 3,” “Download Fest,” “World Record,” and “Download Day.”

The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!).  Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly.  Download day will officially commence once the site goes live.  The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment.  Thanks for your continued support.

We’re just over 12 hours until the start of the long-awaited Download Day!  Our Guinness World Record attempt will start when Firefox 3 is officially launched at approximately 10:00 a.m. PDT (17:00 UTC) on Tuesday, June 17th.

At that time, please check out the official Download Day site to download Firefox and for a map of worldwide downloads!

Did you miss the buzz about the Firefox Screencast Contest? Don’t worry! There are still plenty of chances to win some prizes, but there’s one catch: you have to submit your screencast before 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time today!

Participating only takes a few minutes, and doesn’t require any particular computer or Firefox skills — you just have to pick one of the top 100 knowledge base articles and follow the instructions while recording it with e.g. Jing.

1. Pick an article from the top 100 list
2. Create a screencast for the article
3. Submit your screencast

If you’re one of the 100 winners, your screencast will be used in a Knowledge Base article read by thousands and thousands of Firefox users. Not only will you be rewarded with a prize, you will really make a difference to provide invaluable help for all those users.

Our Guinness World Record attempt for the most software downloads in 24 hours is just around the corner!  As soon as we roll out Firefox 3 on June 17th you’ll have until the same time on June 18th to download Firefox 3.  Don’t worry about forgetting — our friends at Mozilla Hispano and Felipe Gomes of Brazil have created countdown tickers for your blog or Firefox!  Felipe’s ticker add-on will also count down the 24 hours as soon as our attempt starts!

Please remember that we’re only counting complete downloads.  If you’re using an early version of Firefox 3, such as a beta or release candidate, you’ll need to download the new Firefox 3 to be counted.

Don’t forget that Guinness would like to see images and videos of our global Download Fests.  Please tag images and videos with “Firefox 3,” “Download Fest,” “World Record,” and “Download Day.”

Thanks for all of the hard work — we’re almost there!