The Firefox browser created by Mozilla has set a world record with it’s latest browser release (version 3). The record set showed a staggering 8,002,530 downloads with in it’s first 24 hours. That’s a huge amount of early adopters for their latest secure browser.
Guinness World Records have mentioned that this is the most number of downloads of a software package with in a 24 hour period of time.
So how does Firefox achieve such results while Internet Explorer still has almost half it’s users on an older version? The way I look at it is that the average internet user at home who is not tech savvy just uses the default browser on a Windows installation (which is Internet Explorer). These types of users are not in to upgrading and downloading the latest browsers etc… while Firefox users tend to be more technical minded and are therefore excited to see news of their beloved browser getting an upgrade. Firefox has gained quite a large following of loyal users over the last few years due to Internet Explorer not doing so good on a number of fronts (security, validation etc…), and this is what I believe to be key for the FF team.
Another reason of the popularity of June 17 was that it was named around the Firefox community as “Download Day”. Users were encouraged to download the browser on the day of launch, and it seems a good % did just that. Going a step or two further then the average browser launch, Firefox arranged a party and asked users to do the same while including “Download Day” badges on their websites. Awareness of the product was increased immensely by this community effort.
How much data was downloaded that day?
The Firefox 3 download is 7,330,864 bytes in size. Multiply that by the 8,002,530 downloads that day then we get a large amount of data that was shifted around the internet. This comes out at 58,665,459,085,920 bytes of data or 58.67 TB. You can see why it took down the infrastructure of servers on Download Day. Although the servers went down for a couple of hours in the US, and also delays of 1 hour in the UK were reported it still was recovered and when all came back online the rest of the day went with out problems.
Source - PCWorld
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