While Microsoft was busy baking congratulatory IE cakes and cooking Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 due in August, Firefox 3.0 went over the 8.3 million downloads milestone worldwide on just the first day of availability. According to Chief Executive Officer John Lilly, Mozilla has served over 83 Terabytes of Firefox 3.0 in the first 24 hours since the release. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's community coordinator, indicated that predictions ranged around 5 to 7 million downloads, especially with the server problems encountered by Mozilla when Firefox 3.0 went live. In this context, the 8.3 million is a figure which managed to surpass Mozilla's wildest expectations (at the time of this article, Firefox 3.0 downloads are over the 10.8 million mark).

"It's been a very busy 24 hours for Mozilla folks around the world - as our 24 hour initial period draws to a close, I wanted to put a few things into perspective. A little more than 8.3 million downloads (this isn't our official Guinness number - that will be a little lower as we weed out over counts over the next few weeks)," Lilly stated.

Citing data from Internet metrics company Net Applications, Lilly indicated that the market share of Firefox 3.0 exploded to 4% by the end of launch day. Users in 16 countries around the world account for volumes of Firefox 3.0 downloads in excess of 100,000 items, with the latest version of the open source browser being grabbed by users in no less than 200 markets worldwide. To put it simply, the numbers behind Firefox 3.0 Final Download Day, as well as the initial success are breathtaking.

"And if you're interested in what our network has been doing over that time period: 83 terabytes served in total; at the peak, we were serving 17,000 downloads a minute (283 per second!), and saw sustained download rates in excess of 4,000/minute; our peak mirror throughput during the period was 20 gigabits/sec (a huge thanks goes to everyone who helped to create our unbelievably great mirror network)," Lilly added.

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.