Firefox 3 blasts through 8 million downloads in 24 hours, record to be confirmed

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 19 June 2008 04:33

Business IT - Open Source

The 10 biggest downloaders on the day were US, Germany, Japan, Spain, UK, France, Iran, Italy, Canada, and Poland.

This reflects Firefox's strong following in Europe. According to XiTi Monitor, its average browser share across Europe for March 2008 was 28.8 percent.

Australia put in a decent showing on a per-capita basis, with well over 100,000 downloads counting towards the record.

XiTi Monitor's figures give Firefox has a 31.2 percent browser share in Oceania, which includes Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Some of the statistics for the record attempt issued by Mozilla are impressive: a total of 83T was served, with a peak throughput of 20 gigabits per second across the network of mirrors.

Peak activity reached 17,000 downloads a minute, with sustained rates of over 4000 per minute.

While that's a lot of activity, Adobe platform evangelist has rained on Mozilla's parade, claiming that Flash Player is installed 8 million times on an average day.

Downloads are one thing, but is anyone actually using Firefox 3? The answer is on page 3.