Firefox 3.6 Downloaded 17 Million Times in the First Week

Firefox 3.6 has been out for almost a week now, but the latest major release is proving less popular than its predecessors, at least it terms of downloads, if only slightly so. This isn't completely surprising as 3.6 is more of an evolutionary build which, while coming with quite a few new features and updates, is still a much smaller release than either 3.0 or even 3.5. By now, according to Mozilla's own numbers, over 17 million people grabbed the latest and greatest Firefox. Technically, it's not necessarily 17 million people as the same guy could have downloaded it 10 times. On the other hand, another guy could have downloaded it once and installed it for his entire family.

Of course, the bulk of it came in the first couple of days when eager enthusiasts grabbed the final version of Firefox's latest iteration. In its first day of availability it, Firefox 3.6 was downloaded 4.5 million times, 66 percent of them by downloading the installer from the Mozilla page and 33 percent by using the "Check for Updates" feature inside the browser.

That sounds like a decent number of people, but considering that when Firefox 3.5 came out it managed to snatch 5 million downloads in just the first day, it doesn't really sound that impressive. To put things in further perspective, Firefox 3.0 got 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours, setting a Guiness World Record in the process.

In the first two days, Firefox 3.6 was downloaded more than 6 million times. Things wined down a bit after that, but it's still spreading at a healthy pace adding 2 million downloads just from last night, during daytime in the US, from where Firefox 3.6 got the most downloads, almost 3.5 million so far. Expectantly, the runner up in the country rankings is Germany with a little over 2 million downloads. Firefox is extremely popular in Germany and is already the majority browser. After the latest IE security scare numbers picked up even more in the country, so it looks like Firefox still has room to grow.