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It’s past 10AM Pacific time, the moment the big Firefox Download Day is supposed to start, and Mozilla’s Firefox homepage just took five minutes to load and prompted me to download Firefox 2.

Better yet, the Spreadfirefox.com site that shows us how many people over the world have pledged to participate in Firefox 3 Download Day is not loading.

This is not going according to plan for Mozilla.

Thus far, I’m quite happy with the new Mac version. There are a few little things that I really appreciate: one click highlighting in the URL address bar is helpful for the work I do, and the bigger “back” button is nice (doesn’t take much to get me excited). In addition, the newer version offers the “Awesome Bar,” which suggests more complete possible outcomes for URLs you begin typing in. There’s also a zoom feature which may be helpful on smaller screens.

Mozilla is also promising faster loading times, but my very unofficial testing rates Safari as slightly faster than the beta version I’m using. Graphics-heavy MSNBC.com loaded four seconds faster on Safari than Firefox 3, and fast-loading Canon.com also was quicker on Safari. Of course, Safari is a giant pain in the neck in other respects.

It’s 10:35 on the West Coast and the world record isn’t looking good right now. Firefox.com is still offering 2.0 after about three minutes of load time and www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ is give me the ol’ Firefox “page load error/network timeout” screen. Uh-oh.

Looks like it’s available on FTP here. Is this the official final version? It is dated for the 17th and is called “firefox 3.0.dmg” not “firefox 3.0r3.dmg.” I wonder if downloading it off of there will count towards the record? I wonder why the hell I care?

Mozilla’s plan is likely that they will email the 1.7 million who signed up for download day when everything is ready. I still haven’t received the email, and it’s well past their 10AM promised start time. And Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has decided to go to lunch.

10:50AM Update: FTP worked and I have Firefox 3.0. Of course, I just read that it’s exactly the same as RC3 so all of this hullabaloo is for nothing. None of the main Firefox Download Day pages are working as of yet.

11:02AM Update: Another download available through the backdoor (Windows version). Not going to break any records this way, though.

Now I’M going to lunch.

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