The Mozilla Project has smashed its target of five million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours, acheiving a final tally of 8,290,545 downloads of the new browser, and reaching a market share that peaked at over six percent.
Mozilla was aiming to set a Guinness world record for the total number of downloads of a piece of software in a 24-hour period. As part of its marketing effort, it encouraged users to pledge to download Firefox 3 on its release, and to hold download parties.
Online metrics company Net Applications said market share of Firefox 3 peaked at 6.2 percent of all browser usage at 5am EDT on 19 June — less than 48 hours after release.
Just under 300,000 of the downloads in the first 24 hours came from the UK, with the vast majority — 6.5 million — from the US.
Writing in the Mozilla Project blog, the team noted they will need to be patient "as our judges and Guinness World Records validate our record attempt. We'll keep our map up and tracking downloads on Spread Firefox".
The judges will be reviewing the 24-hour period from 11:16am PDT on 17 June.
Meanwhile Opera 9.5 — the latest version of the Nordic browser — achieved over 4.7 million downloads in its first five days, said Opera. Although the number is dwarfed by Firefox's success, Opera reports that use of its browser has doubled since verion 9.0 debuted in 2006, with 32 million users, including 12 million users of the mobile-phone version.
Talkback
wow, 8million downloands in 24hrs, the Mozzila guys really pulled it off this time! Expect other software makers to emulate this style of promotion.
One note of disappointment; only 300,000 downloads came from the UK? are we that insignificant?
Two copies for me... Linux ans Vista. It's faster than FF2, but crashes more on U-Tube.
I wouldn't say the UK is insignificant but certainly being left behind.
Personally, I sometimes despair at our inability to grasp the great new world of Open Source.
It's the only way that we can drive innovation in a home grown technology industry.
So I didn't need to download it because I already had it. Fedora updated its initial RC version with the final release that same day, but that wouldn't have contributed towards the download total.
Maybe lots of other people in the UK are also using Fedora 9 :-) ?
I fell out of love and favour with FF and its fanboy developer club when it became embroiled with a search engine back at v2 beta, however I still use it for secure sites that do not allow Opera rather than fall back to IE.
Meanwhile I was one of the v3 downloads and I have used it once or twice. I haven't see anything that convinces me I should make it my default browser again and so it will continue to sit there as a backup icon.
One obvious trick they failed to grasp was to make it an FF update.
If they had managed to grasp the concept then all the firefox users would have been aware and maybe done the download rather than just the sad ones.