Late absentee to the party

Posted by on 24 Mar 2011 Go to original comments

Firefox 4 Launch Party in Ten ForwardI'm a couple days late, but I work remote so I didn't actually get to attend the Firefox 4 launch party. Working remotely for Mozilla is a double-edged sword - it's a great opportunity to work for the best web company in the world from the comfort of my hometown, but we remotes miss out on the day-to-day awesomeness of company HQ. Even so, along with everyone I was mesmerized by glow.mozilla.org for which fellow webdev's potch, jbalogh, and chowse deserve every compliment they get! All of engineering operations did some amazing work for this. Our VP said it best:

The release day went off without a hitch - we shipped Firefox 4 to over 4 million 6 million people, and if that wasn't enough - we shipped 3.5/3.6 to hundreds of millions more, *at the same time*, all without breaking a sweat! Amazing websites were featured in news outlets such as the NY Times showcasing our amazing webdev talents (both in design and scalability), along with great dashboards from the metrics team that kept everyone on top of how the release was going over various mediums. Users were delighted to have fantastic support articles all updated for Firefox 4 and we caught the few people attempting to game/DoS our infrastructure within minutes. Sync more than tripled its new user rate and hummed along across multiple datacenters. Just amazing across the board.

What's also amazing is the sustained rate of the launch - we pushed 9M downloads on day #2 and we're still pushing 8k downloads per minute, so it looks like we may push another 10M today on day #3! If the other day was a good day for mozillians these last few days have been amazing - inspirational and humbling for this n00b webdev in the org. I can't say how proud I am to work for such a great company, so I'll let this video do it:

Question or comment about this post? Tell me on GitHub.

Late absentee to the party / groovecoder by groovecoder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA
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  1. Robert Kaiser 2011-03-25 07:32:28 -0500
    Couldn't agree more - esp. on the remote argument. Being on board with Firefox the first time for a launch day (as a contractor atm) made me really feel bad about not being in Ten Forward with all this awesomeness. How much I'd like that to change...
  2. pd 2011-03-29 07:25:40 -0500
    We believe in marketing fluff as much as anyone! We don't believe in share? What a load of ... Every decision to butcher the interface is ultimately justified by the notion that you have to target the mainstream. Just ask anyone in the design team but in particular Alex Faaborg. Amongst many I'm 99% sure I've read comments from him making this very justification. Geez I've seen a lot of fluff marketing feelgood videos before, now I've just seen another one. Having said all that, I still love Firefox, even when it leaks memory, I mean, it's tradition now. Firefox would not be the same without it consuming half the available physical RAM to keep less than a dozen tabs open :) I also got an added bit of love from Firefox 4. Apparently Mozilla believes in Blue Screens of Death now, all in the name of video acceleration.
  3. groovecoder 2011-03-29 08:34:52 -0500
    Yeah I'm not usually into "marketing" but the Mozilla message is one worth branding and advertising well. Compare that video to the latest iPhone commercials - "If you don't have an iPhone, well - you don't have an iPhone." Apple's message is smugness and snobbery and sadly, it works. Apple and Microsoft are trapping the mainstream into a closed, corporate and commercially-driven internet; why shouldn't Mozilla aim to help those users out; even by "marketing" means? We're not internet hipsters trying desperately to avoid mainstream trends. The mission of Mozilla and Firefox is to make a better web for EVERYONE. If you don't like the mainstream UI you can fix it yourself. (http://lifehacker.com/#!5784783/how-to-fix-annoyances-with-firefox-4s-new-look, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/firefox-4-ui-fixer/) What platform are you using with the memory leak? I've had it too on Mac OS 10.6 and noticed disabling Flash helps. Apple is right about some things! :) Also check support.mozilla.com to see if someone's already found a fix for your leak.
Late absentee to the party / groovecoder by groovecoder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA