The highly anticipated Firefox 3.5 was just launched two days ago and already it's beginning to see some traction in the browser market with reports putting it at a 2 percent share. It also hit more than 5 million downloads in the first 24 hours, a very respectable number, though smaller than last year's launch of Firefox 3.

“The fastest version yet of Firefox has certainly sprinted out of the blocks with 2.06% usage in the US in a short time,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “This latest addition boosts competition for Microsoft Internet Explorer in the browser market wars.”

Dublin, Ireland-based traffic analysis firm StatCounter saw the new browser rise to a 2.06 percent share of the overall browser market in the US bringing Firefox's total share at 31.8 percent, a very secure second place but still far from the 60 percent owned by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Globally, the numbers followed a similar trend, with Firefox 3.5 gaining 1.95 percent and all of the Firefox versions at 30.7 percent. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer owns 55.8 percent of the world browser market, while Google Chrome has a 2.9 percent share in the US and 2.87 percent worldwide.

In just a few hours after launch, Firefox 3.5 was already at 1 million downloads and managed to get 5 million in 24 hours. That is somewhat lower than the 8.3 million Firefox 3 downloads last year, a number that set the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded piece of software in a 24 hour time frame. Safari 4 also boasted 11 million downloads during its first three days recently, though at least some of those can be attributed to the OS X automated update system. Still, Apple claims 6 million downloads were on Windows machines and Firefox also has an automated update feature.