With over 7 million downloads since its release yesterday, Firefox 4 is out of the gate with some strong momentum, it seems.
That number certainly trounces the statistics from the first day of Internet Explorer 9’s recent release, which hit a little over 2 million downloads.
Unlike the launch of IE9, yesterday’s “download day” for Firefox 4 didn’t have a lot of media publicity pushing users to download the latest browser. That hasn’t seemed to stop users from upgrading.
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The number of downloads, while very impressive, does not break the record for Firefox, set back in 2008 with the release of Firefox 3. Firefox 4 may be the last big release from Mozilla, as the company is moving to a rolling release schedule, much like Google’s Chrome.
Firefox remains the world’s second most popular browser after IE, but both browsers have lost market share recently to Google Chrome.
Chrome, which released the beta version its next version yesterday as well, has a reputation for being faster and less bloated than its competitors, and speed and bloat are both things tackled in Firefox 4.
Of course, you can only make so much out of these first day download numbers. Downloading an updated version doesn’t mean it will become your browser-of-choice. More importantly, the web now has a couple of greatly improved browsers – good news for users and for developers.
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