14 DAY TRIAL // Boasting in excess of 15,000 improvements to the underlying Gecko 1.9 rendering engine of Firefox 3.0, ranging from security to usability, functionality and performance, Mozilla unleashed the latest iteration of its open source browser on June 17. And the response was nothing short of incredible, with Paul Kim, Mozilla Vice President of marketing applauding the millions of users crowding to grab their own copy of Firefox 3.0. At the time of writing this article, Firefox 3.0 was approaching the 5 million downloads milestone at fast pace and it looks like the browser will break the 10 million mark on the official Download Day according to the Firefox 3 download counter.
"Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through - but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We're currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability," Kim revealed.
In just the first twelve hours since the final bits for Firefox 3.0 went live, Mozilla has already counted over 4 million downloads worldwide. This, even if the servers were initially taken down by the overwhelming flood of traffic. "Half way through download day, we're at approximately 4 million downloads and getting about 10K downloads per minute right now. 4 million downloads, and that's after having a partially functioning website the first two hours of that 12 hours. Amazing. My mind is blown," commented Mozilla's community coordinator, Asa Dotzler.
Data provided by Mozilla informed that the official download servers were under high stress having to deal with no less than 2 Gigabits HTTP traffic per second. But the web traffic simply pales in comparison to the download traffic, over 13 GB per second. Mozilla.com is managing something in the line of 14,000 downloads per second, this taking into consideration the fact that Firefox 3.0 weighs in at just 7 MB. In fact, the traffic has prompted Mozilla to estimate that it will go over 10 million downloads in the first day. "We exceeded the first day download mark for Firefox 2 of 1.6 million after just five hours of availability for Firefox 3," Kim added.
But make no mistake about it, there is still plenty of time to grab your very own copy of Firefox 3.0. According to Mozilla, "please download Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18, 2008. That's 11:16 a.m. in Mountain View, 2:16 p.m. in Toronto, 3:16 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 8:16 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 10:16 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 2:16 a.m. in Beijing and 3:16 a.m. in Tokyo".
Firefox 3.0 Final for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.0 Final for Linux is available for download here. Firefox 3.0 Final for Mac OS X is available for download here.
