Just the other day Microsoft Corp. was making a song and dance about their latest browser, Internet Explorer 9, notching up a cool two million downloads in the first 24 hours. Now Mozilla has shown who the king of the browser hill really is, making download stats for the just-released Firefox 4 available publicly, and to say it’s going rather well would be an understatement.
The live download map, available at glow.mozilla.org, shows that in the roughly 48 hours since the new browser launched it has notched up 18.7 million downloads (and growing – fast), and is currently seeing around 7,500 downloads per minute.
The page also breaks down the downloads by region, with Europe currently proving the most Firefox-hungry locale with 7.5 million (hardly surprising, given Firefox recently overtook IE to become the most popular browser in the region). North America is second with around six million, followed by Asia with 3.1 million.
Aside from looking pretty, the site also allows you to dive very deep into the download figures, For example I can tell you that my home county of West Sussex, in the United Kingdom, has seen 4,016 downloads, and Columbus, Ohio, where I am as I type this, has ensnared 20,637 early adopters.
Despite the apparent immense popularity of the new browser, and trumping its Microsoft-designed competition almost threefold, Firefox 4 failed to best the current browser download record of eight million in 24 hours, which was set by its younger sibling, Firefox 3, back in 2008. To its credit, it came close, scoring 7.1 million.
