Tuesday 17th June was supposed to be a big day in Firefox history. The long awaited version 3 of the popular browser was to be released to record breaking numbers of downloads. The world would be in awe of the majesty of ... wait, maybe that's going a bit far.

Anyway, Tuesday came and went, and I didn't download it. I tried, but I failed. There were two things that stopped me in the end. First, the stability of the servers. All the various domains returned 'Http/1.1 Service unavailable' errors in the evening when I actually tried to get it. That didn't help.

The main thing that stopped me, though, was that it was released at 10am on the 17th. 10am PDT that is. California time. Those of us with a vague grasp of world geography will know that California is on the trailing edge of the world timezones. Indeed, by the time 10am PDT rolled around, it was already Wednesday the 18th at the international date line. Being sat there looking at the Firefox 2 link on the 17th didn't do wonders for the world at large's perception of the Mozilla organisation's ability to, well, organise.

In my mind, there were two possible things they could have done to make it not suck like it did. Either release it at midnight GMT (or UTC as people now like to refer to it), making sure that the two extreme timezones have at least 12 hours on the 17th where it is available. This would satisfy the world record download attempt's rules of it only being one day. The other way would be to launch at midnight on the 16th on the international date line, meaning it would require 48 hours before the whole world had seen midnight on the 17th.

Either way, the Firefox site gave no indication of intentions, fell over repeatedly and generally left those further east of California wondering what the hell was going on. Remember, Silicon Valley people, that most of the world sees the dawn long before you do. Without giving us more information than "the 17th" we'll all just get bored and wander off to the pub. Which, in fact, I did.