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

    Erick Schonfeld

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

    Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

    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

    U.S.
    Germany
    Japan
    Spain
    UK
    France
    Iran
    Italy
    Canada
    Poland

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

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