New Firefox claims victory, but is it a record?
The numbers are in: of Firefox 3 were downloaded on its first day. But is this really a record breaker? Adobe begs to differ.
The folks at Guinness World Records still need to verify the Firefox figure 鈥� that could take days 鈥� but the browser鈥檚 creator, Mozilla, is proudly touting its 鈥渘ew record鈥� for the most downloads in a 24-hour period.
Just to be clear, there is . Guinness has never tracked this before. So when Mozilla first approached them, they set the bar at 5 million. With Firefox's download rate reaching (or 1.5 gigabytes per second) by Tuesday morning, Firefox 3 blew past its goal.
While Guinness takes the official tally, one blogger is challenging the benchmark. 鈥淚鈥檓 pretty impressed, I like it, and the downloads thing is good marketing,鈥� writes Ryan Stewart, who works for Adobe. 鈥淏ut to put that in perspective, we get of the Flash Player ... on an average day.鈥�
Last March, Abode executive Kevin Lynch told eWeek.com that, 鈥淩ight now, Flash Player 9 is being installed at the rate of about .鈥�
Of course, Adobe's numbers have also not been vetted by Guinness, and they by no means take away Firefox鈥檚 impressive day. Firefox 2.0 only got 1.6 million downloads its first day 鈥� a figure the new version surpassed in just .
What will be more interesting to see now is if this burst of downloads affects Firefox鈥檚 standing against Internet Explorer. IE still dominates the field with 74 percent market share. But Firefox is catching up, growing from 14 to 18 percent over the past year. I assume that most people downloading Firefox 3 on Tuesday were simply replacing their older versions, but maybe Mozilla鈥檚 big week will let Firefox continue to nip at Microsoft鈥檚 heels.
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Battle of the browsers
