Well, the 17th is here! I went onto the Firefox site this morning and no Firefox 3, still just the notice about "come back on the 17th!"

I went back later and still no Firefox 3.

Checked again in the afternoon. No Firefox 3.

It's now been over seventeen hours since July 17th began for me, and absolutely no sign of Firefox 3, with no indication on the site of when it will arrive.

:-(



The record attempt has had loads of coverage on places like the BBC News site, and they all said the 17th of July, but the problem seems to be that official FF3 press release didn't say any kind of exact time at all.

It turns out that for a lot of people it won't even happen on the 17th, because the "download day" is being started at 10am California time. That means that for most of the world, the majority of the record attempt's 24 hour period will actually be on the 18th. That wouldn't matter so much if people had been given local start times, or indeed any kind of start time, but they weren't, all they were given was a date which turns out to be mostly inaccurate.

It's hard to believe the Mozilla Foundation are serious about this record attempt if they neglect to include the exact time when the 24 hours would begin in the press release or on their website. Even just a big countdown clock on the front page of the site would have helped enormously, but there was nothing like that, not even anything saying "10 am pacific time". At the time of writing there's STILL no clue about when the download begins on the front page.

I only found out this "10 am california" time because I bothered to look on some of the Firefox blogs, but how many non-Firefox users will go to such trouble? And even on the blogs, there were some disappointed people who had stayed up all night to download it at midnight their local time, assuming that's how it would work because no exact time was given. Apparently even some Californians have been disappointed because they assumed it would begin at midnight.

Are the people organising this assuming everyone reads Firefox blogs, even those new to Firefox that this event is meant to attract?


...but worst of all, there IS a "download firefox" link in a prominent place on the front page which downloads Firefox 2. A lot of people have probably been downloading that today thinking it counts towards the record. All those downloads will go to waste because they won't count. Of course it helps spread Firefox too, which is a good thing, but it still gives an impression of rather poor planning in this whole event.

How the heck could they set up the whole pledge system and promote it so widely, only to throw it away by not even displaying a start time or countdown on the website?

It also means that a large proportion of downloads on the 17th worldwide may well be of FF2, which is an interesting way of launching FF3... :-)