Walk Alone

8,002,530

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

We made it!

Update, 4th July, 2008 - Here’s the page with details. Another thing to note is that this number reflects deliberate downloads. No trick links, bots or scripted attempts. Repeated attempts and incomplete downloads were rejected. Also, upgrades from older browsers as well as the numerous installs on various APT and YUM managed Linux machines were not counted.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Firefox 3.0 is scheduled for release on Tuesday, June 17, 2008.

No software is perfect, not even Linux. For Ubuntu 8.04 coming out tomorrow, here are a few eccentricities I hope will disappear.

• The desktop doesn’t arrange the icons in a grid - at least, not as well as Windows does it. The current ‘grid’ looks like it was laid out by a toddler; its that loose. And while the devs are at it, can they do something about the overlapping text for adjacent icons?
• Whenever I edit a file on the Desktop, its icon moves to the upper left corner on its own. What gives?
• The balloon popup with the update notification icon is nice, but maybe it should be pointing at the orange update icon, not at some other icon in the notification area.
• I use an ADSL net connection and run Apache on localhost. Now get this: in Firefox, without an active ADSL net connection, I can’t visit localhost. The page times out! The Apache access log shows no request made to apache to serve a page. It works in Epiphany without any problems!
• When playing a video file, the video stream goes kaput. Reopening the video (in any player) doesn’t help; I still get the weird pink snowing static. Restarting X server solves the problem. To be fair, this has occurred exactly two times in two years.

Now you may ask (with justification) why I haven’t filed bug reports. None of the above are predictable or reproducible, as far as I know. The last one has occurred just two times in two years - if I were the developer, I would shrug it off. For the rest, I’m pretty sure I’m missing some config setting somewhere.

Be ready to open up your torrents.