June 17th, 2008
Firefox needs a big bat to set a download record
The “gold” version of Firefox 3 is ready to go, and to celebrate the gang at Mozilla wants to set a download record, 1 million or more downloads in a single day.
There’s a page with a map of the world where you can pledge to download, and mouse over other nations to see how many people there have done the same.
There I have learned that 158 people in Zimbabwe are pausing from their civil strife to download Firefox. Over 1,000 Afghanis and over 2,000 Pakistanis have also pledged. (How many of them are near the border?) And there are 307 pledged downloads from North Korea.
That’s great but it seems a bit divisive. Aren’t we all in this together?
Back in the day, 2003 to be precise, Howard Dean supporters began the practice of using a bat to measure their online fundraising. This was at a time when a few thousand contributions was a lot.
This is not a political point, so this example of a big bat was taken from a conservative humor site called Bad Example. The point is you measure everyone’s contributions together, against the goal.
What say you, Mozilla? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some downloading to do. (UPDATE: That’s the wrong URL. Here is the right URL for downloads of Firefox 3 in English. And here is the main page for downloads in all languages.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/17/08
