Its been exactly 6 hours since we made FF2.0.0.16 -> FF3.0.1 Major Update live.

In those 6 hours, we’ve now served major updates to 1,416,982 users.

Thats impressive when you think that we pushed the updates live exactly 6 hours ago. (7.15pm PST), and we initially had throtting enabled. Now, with throttling off for the last 3 hours, we’re picking up the pace, doing 7095 major updates *per minute*. Thats 118 major updates *per second*. This means the total for the next 6 hours should be higher again.

After the Guinness Book of Records event, its easy to take numbers like that as “ho hum”… but thats a *lot* of people upgrading. Very exciting times!

This Major Update release feels like it went really smoothly. Especially going from start to finish in only 10 days. To be fair, we have been working on this since Dec2007, when it was on the RelEng and QA goals for Q2 2007. At the time, we wanted to make sure that, as much as possible, any major-upgrade-blockers were found and fixed *before* we released Firefox 3.0. This was our 5th complete end-to-end “test run”, and it worked great. It also forced us to cross-check partner builds, and all sorts of interesting upgrade scenarios, long before we released, …not after! See bug#394046 for some details. All this behind-the-scenes-homework was already done, so this rapid turnaround was totally possible.

Big tip-o-the-hat to nthomas (after months of work, he was on leave when the actual release happened!), bhearsum (for stepping in at the last minute), Tomcat, juanb and last-but-not-least to rhelmer (who came back to help with moral support and sanity checking!).