Categories: Discussions

Firefox 3 Launch — Firefox Support Relaunch!

What an amazing launch we’ve had so far! At the time I’m writing this, over 6.5 million people have downloaded Firefox 3, and from a Firefox Support perspective it shows. The majority of the support questions we’ve received the last 20 hours have been about Firefox 3.

This launch was an intensive stress test of our new support system. With any software release, issues can quickly become very frequently reported and need to be escalated. We were on full alert, and had previously setup specific rules for how to handle cases when issues are surfaced. Whenever a major issue was reported multiple times in a high frequency, we would file a “critical” priority bug to get the solution to the problem documented in the Knowledge Base and then seed it into the top 10 article list of the front page.

We had to do that a couple of times yesterday (Firefox 3 upgrade reverts bookmarks and other settings to older version and Firefox 3 will not start on Mac OS X 10.3.9). This is just the beginning, though, and we are continuing our mission for improved support. Jason is working on a list of the most common issues reported so we can hand that over to the development and QA teams. We would also like to figure out exactly how much promoting a common issue to the front page helps us. The relevant data here seems to be the ratio between a specific problem vs other problems, and how that data changes when we promote it to the front page. This is just one of the metrics we would like to have in order to continuously improve SUMO.

With the powerful group of helpful people who teamed up around the SUMO project, we were able to help countless of new users. And we definitely had lots of fun while doing it! Yesterday, I was helping around 15 users using Live Chat. In some of these chat sessions, trainees (hi Koko and Frankieo!) were watching while I was helping the user, in order to give them a taste of how the Live Chat experience is like. After some sessions, we also tried the other way around (me watching/mentoring while the trainees were interacting with the users). All in all, it was a very fun, collaborative, but also challenging experience, and we all learned from it. I hope to see the new trainees again today, and tomorrow!

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the loyal and incredibly helpful contributors of the SUMO project, and welcome all the new ones. Without your hard work and dedication to Mozilla, we wouldn’t be able to be as responsive to our users as we were. Thank you!

Wow, we’re up at 7 million downloads now! That’s 500,000 new downloads while I was writing this post. Either I’m an extremely slow writer, or people really like Firefox. :)

3 comments on “Firefox 3 Launch — Firefox Support Relaunch!”

  1. Atanu Dey wrote on

    I made a big mistake downloading FF 3. Now the google toolbar does not work, which means that none of the bookmarks that I had stored in google toolbar work.

    When I try to access the bookmarks on google toolbar, it asks me to “sign in” and when I do, it does nothing. It keeps prompting me to sign in.

    I think a few million people are going to be very unhappy. I regret updating. I attempted to re-install FF 2 and it does not work. It crashes every time I start FF 2.

    What a disaster.

  2. Paul wrote on

    cannot print from firefox. Everything still works from other browsers. Everything in Firefox comes out blank

  3. Nosir wrote on

    Since your support forums are a shambles filled with filthy, stinking goat-children, I’m going to attempt to post this anywhere I can until
    something starts working:

    [STATE YOUR ISSUE]
    Yes, exactly the same as above (http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=en-US&comments_parentId=83594&forumId=1) The primary reason for my deep-seated hatred of Firefox3 is this glaring error on the part of the developers.

    Didn’t you test this? Didn’t you notice about 30% of the XP users can’t download even a JPEG to their HD and open it to view it? Thanks for making the old version easy to locate, except for making a big obvious button on the front page of the FF3 site for all the other people that got screwed. Here, the button should be HUGE and say “ROLL BACK TO SOMETHING THAT WORKS” and it should point here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

    I have various FF3 addons I downloaded from the Mozilla site, and they are compatible with FF3 per the update interface. This issue started happening as soon as I installed FF3 and it rather cost me some valuable time and effort at my place of business.

    Since the stupid-as-hell “Download Day” I have been combing the web for solutions to this problem, and it would seem there are multiple fixes THAT DON’T WORK. Don’t bother referring me to the IE Security Zones portion of Internet Options. Don’t bother linking this embarrassing thread to me:
    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=645496&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=20e0e41ac563fb6e6f29465cae2fdaee

    Or this one:
    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Unable_to_save_or_download_files#Reset_system_Internet_security_settings_-_Windows

    Or this one:
    http://forums.macnn.com/82/applications/370639/cant-download-anything-with-firefox-3-a/

    I could go on, but I won’t. You know what the deal is. Fix it. How completely ridiculous it looks to strive for some pointless “world record” for software downloads, when it is quite obvious the world record you made
    was “Largest Software Blunder To Date”. LOL. Internet Exploder indeed.