Firefox 3 powers to a smashing download record

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 14:12

Business IT - Open Source

Mozilla has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, receiving more than its hoped for 5 million downloads of Firefox 3 in less than 14 hours. So for the first day of the new browser's life, it's onward to 7 million!

The download record period officially began at 11.16am US Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday.

A pre-publication check showed the count had reached 5,079,227.

Since there is no existing Guinness world record for downloads, there is no specific number that must be reached. Organisers were hoping to at least exceed the 1.6 million downloads of Firefox 2 on its launch day, and that was reached in five hours.

"We are currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability," said Mozilla's Paul Kim in the organisation's blog http://blog.mozilla.com/ at 3.26pm.

Hot spots accounting for more than 100,000 downloads include the US (over 2 million downloads), Canada, Brazil. the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Iran and China and japan.

Australia's doing well on a per-capita basis, with over 83,000 downloads.

The release of the new version seems likely to increase Firefox's market share. Mozilla's Blog of Metrics recently noted  "rapid adoption" of the release candidate along with continued growth of Firefox 2 usage.

What do the stats say? Find out on page 2 .