14 DAY TRIAL // Now that things are settling down following the Firefox 4 launch, Mozilla is providing some stats and info highlighting the first two days after the browser became available. Firefox 4 racked up 15.85 million downloads in that time frame, with the second day being bigger than the first.
Firefox 4 launched on Tuesday, after more than a year of development. The latest and greatest Mozilla browser has plenty to show for itself and is clearly the best Firefox to date.
It also fixes some of the weaknesses Firefox had and makes it a worthwhile competitor to Chrome and company in most aspects.
No wonder then that plenty of people were very interested to put the latest version through its paces. What's more, since Firefox is the second most popular browser worldwide, current users that got notified of the update started upgrading their browser, adding to the number of downloads.
In the first day, Firefox 4 didn't manage to topple the current record for most downloads in a day, set by Firefox 3 and sitting at 8.3 million, but it came close, tallying a total of 7.1 million downloads.
Considering the much different landscape in which Firefox 4 launched, where Chrome is growing ever more powerful and already has a respectable market share plus seemingly unstoppable traction and where the recently launched Internet Explorer 9 is actually a contender in terms of speed, standards support and so on, it's perhaps commendable that it actually managed to come close to the previous record.
What's more, the number of downloads picked up in the second day when Firefox 4 was grabbed by 8.75 million people (of course one users could be responsible for more downloads).
Firefox 4 downloads peaked at an impressive 10,200 per minute and averaged 5,503 in the first two days. It was most popular in Europe, hardly surprising, where it was downloaded 6.63 million times and in the US from where 4.45 million downloads came from. Currently, almost four days after launch, Firefox 4 is very close to 30 million downloads.