Remember the Firefox Download Day?

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At their busiest the servers were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute.

I get it!

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Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it "an extremely impressive accomplishment".

Before anyone harps that it isn't, what's most interesting is that in an attempt to make a record, people across the world decided to take part. Just in that, it's mildly interesting at least, regardless of the ultimately meaningless marketshare of Internet browsers.

Bullshit record for two reasons:

1) there was no previous record. They didn't have to beat anything to get it.
2) millions of OSS fanatics set up scripts to continuously download it multiple times a day to pump up the numbers. Mozilla used "cookie-based verification". Yeah. I'm sure no one has ever figured out how to clear a cookie before...

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Original post by Mithrandir 1) there was no previous record. They didn't have to beat anything to get it.

Sure, it was a marketing campaign, not a scientific endeavour. But I think it's fair to say it is at least one of the highest number of recorded downloads in one day. And apparently Guinness World Records accepted it.

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2) millions of OSS fanatics set up scripts to continuously download it multiple times a day to pump up the numbers. Mozilla used "cookie-based verification". Yeah. I'm sure no one has ever figured out how to clear a cookie before...

Source? If 'millions' means at least two million and 'multiple times' means at least two times, almost half the downloads would be caused by running scripts? I find that hard to believe.



I didn't download it until today. It looks okay, but I don't like that fancy address bar, the 'intellisense' keeps navigating me to the wrong sites. Maybe I can switch it off..

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Original post by Mithrandir Bullshit record for two reasons: 1) there was no previous record. They didn't have to beat anything to get it. 2) millions of OSS fanatics set up scripts to continuously download it multiple times a day to pump up the numbers. Mozilla used "cookie-based verification". Yeah. I'm sure no one has ever figured out how to clear a cookie before...

1) no, there wasnt. But theres nothing stopping you from going out and trying to break that record. Until you do it remains a record. Put your money where your mouth is.

2) The record was for "most downloads in a 24 hour period", not "most downloads by unique users in a 24 hour period".

Record stands, deal with it, or go beat it.

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Original post by WanMaster Sure, it was a marketing campaign, not a scientific endeavour. But I think it's fair to say it is at least one of the highest number of recorded downloads in one day. And apparently Guinness World Records accepted it.

I dunno, I think I'm with superpig when he said the record might actually be deserved by Windows Update. However I don't have any data at all, nonetheless accurate data.

FWIW I hate the fancy address bar too, does my head in.

is this the sort of record that should be encouraged?

whats to stop some dude writing a virus script that downloads something on X date + breaking the record.

>>FWIW I hate the fancy address bar too, does my head in.

prepared to see something similar in the next version of internet explorer

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Original post by WanMaster Source? If 'millions' means at least two million and 'multiple times' means at least two times, almost half the downloads would be caused by running scripts? I find that hard to believe.

It wouldn't even have to be millions. The download is only 7.8 MB, meaning that on any broadband connection you can probably get it in ~10 seconds. That's ~8640 downloads a day. Even if only 500 users were using such a script it would still be over 4 million downloads. My point is that it wouldn't actually be that hard for a handful of fanatics to greatly inflate the download numbers if they really wanted do. Even a 1 million download inflation would be quite significant.

I don't really care either way (and I'm not asserting it actually happened), just wanted to point out that the numbers could work out.

Well, that was sort of my point: if millions of l33t hax0rz produced a total of eight million downloads, then with an average of four downloads per person, they might as well not have bothered using a script at all.

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Original post by Mithrandir 1) there was no previous record. They didn't have to beat anything to get it.

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BBC News Within five hours the number of downloads for Version 3.0 exceeded the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006.

Donno if that was a record, but thats the impression I got.

I was going to download Firefox 3 but they they found that security flaw so I guess I'm waiting for that to be fixed.

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Original post by WanMaster It looks okay, but I don't like that fancy address bar, the 'intellisense' keeps navigating me to the wrong sites

I don't like the new address bar either, the suggestions take up 2 lines instead of one now. You can download the oldbar extension to restore the original appearance but it still uses the same autocomplete algorithm as the firefox 3 bar.

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Original post by necromancer_df Quote: Original post by WanMaster It looks okay, but I don't like that fancy address bar, the 'intellisense' keeps navigating me to the wrong sites I don't like the new address bar either, the suggestions take up 2 lines instead of one now. You can download the oldbar extension to restore the original appearance but it still uses the same autocomplete algorithm as the firefox 3 bar.

Looking at the comments there apparently is an about config tweak you can do to use the old algo.
about:config browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped=true

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I can confirm the config edit combined with the addon works perfectly.

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Original post by Jarrod1937 Quote: Original post by necromancer_df Quote: Original post by WanMaster It looks okay, but I don't like that fancy address bar, the 'intellisense' keeps navigating me to the wrong sites I don't like the new address bar either, the suggestions take up 2 lines instead of one now. You can download the oldbar extension to restore the original appearance but it still uses the same autocomplete algorithm as the firefox 3 bar. Looking at the comments there apparently is an about config tweak you can do to use the old algo. about:config browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped=true edit: I can confirm the config edit combined with the addon works perfectly.

Sweet, I'll try it out! Thanks to the both of you.

Edit: I see, it does work, however if you have any favorited items, where you put a solid star next to the url, then it will bring those up no matter what character you type in. Anyone know how to clear your favorited urls?

Edit2: Apparently you visit the fav url, then click on the solid star and say "remove." And with that done it is performing just like firefox 2's bar.

[Edited by - Jarrod1937 on July 4, 2008 10:54:44 AM]

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Original post by Jarrod1937 Don't get too excited though, its still a bit funky after messing around with it more. If i type in "j" it does only display my site, it does the same for oher sites. But if i do "y" for youtube it will pulldown sky.fm first. It also seems to still pull results from your bookmarks. But it is improved. I'm going to sniff around the config a bit more to see what else may be lurking there for the address bar.

That sounds like what I was experiencing. Every time I wanted to go to google.com and started typing, it would suggest images.google.com, so I had to type in either the entire domain or use the arrow keys to navigate the list. I think it made that assumption because in that short period of time I visited the image search more frequently than the web search.

Edit: so I left the reply window open, went for a sandwich, made the post, and discovered your post had been modified. ;)

As far as "records" go, to me this is sillier than the guy who spun the most basketballs simultaneously or the folks who built and rode the longest skis. It's just not remarkable, specifically because they were trying to do it. If it just happened, then it would be remarkable. Because they were trying to game the system, that makes it cheap. This can't be compared to any other download stat, because nobody else has bothered to organized a mass download like this.

It's like remarking on the statistical improbability of everyone in a room spontaneously sputtering the word "trout" at the same time... after having organized before hand to synchronize their watches.

Even if the downloads were spoofed (I thought they also checked IPs for duplicate downloads and such?) the terms of the record is still "Most software downloads in 24 hours". Ten bucks says that Microsoft could, if they wanted to, give Guiness a ring and hand them the download numbers for a single day of Windows Update downloads. It probably wouldn't even have to be a tuesday!

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Original post by Cypher19 Even if the downloads were spoofed (I thought they also checked IPs for duplicate downloads and such?) the terms of the record is still "Most software downloads in 24 hours". Ten bucks says that Microsoft could, if they wanted to, give Guiness a ring and hand them the download numbers for a single day of Windows Update downloads. It probably wouldn't even have to be a tuesday!

I am reminded of an admonition my father gave me once. "If you ever feel like mocking a person for the sport they play, remember that any sport looks silly to anyone not involved in it." Whereas I may not care how long so-and-so rode a unicycle in a single go, other unicyclists do care. The fact that MS or Opera don't release their download numbers (and I think it's a pretty safe bet to say they will not, even if the person in charge hears about this) shows that, even though they are in the same "competitive field" as the Mozilla group, they don't care about such statistics either.

If diehard scrabble players thought the most simultaneous games of scrabble was an inconsequential record, then the non-scrabble players amongst us should probably take that as a cue that we shouldn't care either.