Geekonomics

60-100 copies of Firefox 3.5 being downloaded every second

Jul 1, 2009 02:34

Mozilla finally launched the long-awaited Firefox 3.5, and within the first 30 minutes of launch, there was almost a million downloads at an average rate of 60-100 downloads per second as seen in Mozilla's real-time public statistics.

Compare this with exactly one year ago where Mozilla broke the world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours, with over 8 million Firefox 3 downloads. I would be pretty confident to say that Mozilla can easily match or even break the record this time round, although the browser landscape has changed somewhat with Google Chrome launched in September 2008.

Many users will decide for themselves which will be the browser of choice, like Gordon Shippey:

New Firefox 3.5 is out today. I think I like it. Deciding on Chrome or Firefox as my default browser is a hard choice! #firefox #fx35

It is hardly surprising that this launch trended in Twitter with the hashtag #fx35 and a quick scan showed that user responses had largely been positive save for a few:

• "Everything is broken" after installation


• "Don't really see a change"


• Performs faster on the Mac than on the PC.

Some others felt that Firefox 3.5 was faster and "snappier" than Safari 4 and as fast as Google Chrome on Gmail.

I don't know about you, but this geek is likely going to pull back and wait a day or two for any bugs to straighten out. But I think it will be a really tough choice deciding whether Firefox or Chrome will be the browser of my choice. Generally, I like Firefox for its speed, familiar interface, and ease of plug-in installation compared with Chrome where some plug-ins seems to have problems installing. However, some of Chrome's features are really awesome, like the V8 engine and the way tabs are handled.

When this geek first started writing this post, there were about 950k downloads. As at time of publishing, there are now 1.07 million downloads, and growing fast. So, have you downloaded your Firefox 3.5 today or are you going to wait a while for any bugs to sort themselves out?

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