Firefox 3: 6.5 7 Million Downloads and Counting …
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 18, 2008 at 5:17 AM PT
Looks like Firefox Download Day will be one for the record books after all.
Though its servers were initially overwhelmed by the volume of download requests yesterday, Mozilla soon had the Firefox 3 download site humming along nicely. Yesterday afternoon, it was serving up 14,000 downloads a minute and 13 gigabits of data a second. And within 5 hours it had broken Firefox 2’s single-day record of 1.6 million downloads and by 5 a.m. PDT today–18 hours into its world record attempt–it had already blown the doors off the 5 million mark it had set for itself with 6,415,252 downloads. By 7 a.m. PDT it was closing in on 7 million.
“We’re incredibly happy to have released Firefox 3 and for nearly 7 million people so far to care enough to make a positive decision to download it and use it,” Mozilla CEO John Lilly told Digital Daily. “A few more hours left in download day and then we’ll shift away from thinking about download day and back to thinking about what’s next. How to make the browser even more useful on your desktop and in your pocket, and how to help more people understand that the browser is the lens that we often look at the world through today. But it’s been amazing to watch the map though the day as countries woke up and went to sleep–really gives you a sense of how global things are now.”
Global, indeed. Worldwide usage share of Firefox 3.0 has spiked since yesterday. According to independent data compiled live by analysis firm Net Applications, 4.23% of the world’s browsers are declaring themselves as Firefox 3 in HTTP requests.
UPDATE: Firefox 3 has broken the 7 million downloads barrier. As of 7:44 a.m. PDT, 7,067,347 copies of the browser had been downloaded.
(Image Credit: Al Billings)
