Firefox 3

Well, download day 2008 is about 5 and a half hours underway. If you don’t know what it’s all about, Firefox is trying to set a world records for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. So far they’re doing really well, at 2.2 million (a map and count). Unfortunately it kicked off to a rather shakey start. At precisely 1:00PM EDT, and 10:00PDT, the Mozilla.org servers were pummeled by likely thousands of people trying to download at once. Since then things have smoothed out considerable:
Firefox 3 Coming Soon

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.

The blog also posts some interesting numbers:

• 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

I think it should be interesting to see how this turns out. I hope all of the automatic downloads have been counted, such as those through Ubuntu’s Repositories, and Gentoo’s Portage. I’ve been updating various computers around. Unfortunately, most of the computer at my university won’t be counted, as they’re all just ghost images of each other.

My first impressions of Firefox 3 weren’t great. While it was compiling on my Gentoo box, I looked at the screenshot on the Firefox page, it had a really spiffy looking UI:

Unfortunately, I use KDE, and KDE is set to make GTK apps to look like Qt apps, however, Firefox really looked mangled, so after I fixed that, it looks a lot better, but still not as nice. Other than that, it’s too early for me to comment on memory usage, and I haven’t notice a big speed improvement.

On the bright side, their choice to show a Wikipedia article from Atlantic Canada (where I live) amused be quite a bit: