Firefox 3 Has a Huge Week

Mozilla promoted June 17^th as “Download Day 2008,” asking supporters to help them set a new Guinness World Record by downloading its new Firefox 3.0 Web browser. There currently is not official record for this, though Firefox 3.0 is making a strong case with its 8.3 million downloads in its first 24 hours of release on June 17^th.

The new version of the browser received a fair amount of media coverage, and with a purported 15,000 new improvements and features, it appears that Firefox is pushing even harder to make a bigger dent in Internet Explorer’s market leader position.

According to Net Applications Inc., Firefox’s market share at the end of last week was 19.17%, an increase of 0.76% from its 18.41% market share in May. Microsoft’s IE was down on the week to 72.95%, a 0.8% decline from its May market share. Apple’s Safari browser was down 0.1% from its May share, ending last week with 6.15% of the market.

Vince Vizzaccaro, the executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications, warns that this initial jump in Firefox’s market share might not be completely accurate, saying that it was possible that some “unique visitors” were counted twice. He indicated that it may take a few weeks for the dust to settle on the matter.

Still, Vizzaccaro expects Firefox’s market share to reach 20% sometime in July, based on trends.

Firefox 2.0 was downloaded 1.6 million times during its first 24 hours of release.

As of Monday night, more than 18.5 million copies of Firefox 3.0 had been downloaded, and the Guinness Book of World Records was still considering the accomplishment.

Sources:</strong

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/23/Firefox_3_hits_173_million_downloads-Macworld_UK_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/23/Firefox_3_hits_173_million_downloads-Macworld_UK_1.html

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=open_source&articleId=9102398&taxonomyId=88&intsrc=kc_top

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord