The Hype Worked: Firefox 3 Downloaded 8.3 Million Times In First 24 Hours

[TechCrunch]

Despite getting off to a slow start yesterday, the official release of the Firefox 3 browser was downloaded 8.3 million times (that’s the unofficial tally as of 11:16 AM PT today). Mozilla beat its goal of 5 million downloads by 3 million and set a new world record! All right, there was no previous world record, but it still represents a massive one-day adoption rate.

According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, that gives Firefox 3 a four percent market share of browsers worldwide straight out of the gate. Mozilla’s servers sent out 83 terabytes of data during that time, and at the peak there were 17,000 downloads per second (with an average of 4,000 per second). That explains why I had to wait so long to download my copy. The browser was downloaded in 200 different countries, with the top ten being

1. U.S.
2. Germany
3. Japan
4. Spain
5. UK
6. France
7. Iran
8. Italy
9. Canada
10. Poland

Yes, Firefox 3 is big in Iran and Poland. IE doesn’t stand a chance.


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[Fanatic]

I downloaded mine, but it's hard to get excited about a new browser. As long as it works, who cares?

[Yahooligan]

Has anyone done any benchmarks yet? What's faster... IE7 or FF3?

[David]

Originally Posted by Yahooligan

Has anyone done any benchmarks yet? What's faster... IE7 or FF3?

All the benchmarks done in the past few months have been based on FF3b, I don't have a link handy, but IE7 is a beast, it's much slower.

But it's also not really fair to compare FF3 (brand new) to IE7 (more than a year old). You really have to compare to IE8b, but I'm not sure when that's going to hit anyway.

[David]

Originally Posted by Fanatic

I downloaded mine, but it's hard to get excited about a new browser. As long as it works, who cares?

I had been using FF3 since beta1 or 2, and it's been leaps and bounds faster than FF2. I had been using IE7 before that, because FF2 sucks so much... so it's actually kind of exciting, but the excitement was months ago.