Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

more on the guinness world record

A few people have asked me questions or otherwise raised what they though were serious issues or flaws in the Mozilla Firefox Download Day 2008 Guinness World Record attempt. I figured it was worth a quick blog post to clear up some of those questions and misunderstandings.

• "There was no pre-existing record so Mozilla didn't break any records."

The is an accurate statement but not quite right. There was no pre-existing record. One cannot break a record without it being first established. Mozilla didn't set out to break any existing records, though. Mozilla set out to set the record. With the help of more than 8 million Firefox fans, Mozilla and its community succeeded.

• "It's meaningless because any number of downloads, even just one, would have set the record."

Not quite. Guinness doesn't accept a new World Record unless it finds the event to be of interest. Had Mozilla achieved only a few downloads, Guinness would not have agreed to give Mozilla a spot in the Guinness World Record books.

• "This was just a stunt."

First, are you familiar with the Guinness Book of World Records at all? Even casually aware of what it is? It's a collection of interesting, entertaining, and often completely wacky accomplishments. Mozilla, with great interest from its community and with obvious interest from many millions of its users, thought this would be an interesting, entertaining, and even somewhat wacky, but most of all fun challenge and so we did it.

• "Windows Update on 'patch Tuesday' would easily beat this record."

Actually, probably not. The record attempt was clearly defined by Mozilla and Guinness beforehand and intentionally made to not cover automatic software updates. Mozilla could easily serve out many times more automatic updates in a 24 hour period, but that's not something that gets our community and our users engaged and excited so that's not what this was about. This was about millions of people, from all over the world, coming together and taking a very specific collective action.

• "If Firefox is so great, it shouldn't need do marketing."

I think that's kind of like saying "if the kid is so smart, why does he need to read books." Marketing is about education. It's about raising awareness of new opportunities. We're thrilled with what our community has built in Firefox 3 and as a community, we want as many people to hear about it, to try it, and ultimately to get a better Web experience by adopting it.

Our approach to marketing is radically different and follows the traditions of Mozilla's open source code development with strong community leadership and participation. If our community decides that large-scale marketing efforts like World Download Day are no longer interesting, fun, or effective, then we'll probably change. But today, that's not the case, and there are millions in the community that think we're all on the right path with spreading Firefox.

Mozilla and Firefox are people-powered and while our financial resources are a tiny fraction of our primary competitors, our active and enthusiastic community is unrivaled. There's no greater proof than the success of World Download Day. I wasn't directly involved in the World Download Day program, but I was there in the very beginning of Mozilla's grass-roots, people-powered, community marketing program and I believe strongly in the abilities and the judgment of our community marketing team. I think Download Day was a phenomenal success and I'm proud to count myself as one of the 8M+ people who set the Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in a day.

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