In its first four days of availability, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was reportedly downloaded over 3 million times. At the time, Mozilla had yet to release similar statistics for Firefox 2. Last week, lead Firefox developer Mike Beltzner finally broke the silence about Firefox 2 downloads, proudly announcing that the browser was downloaded over 2 million times in the first 24 hours of launch.
Apparently, people loves them some Firefox. Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.
Pondering why Firefox is so popular, Beltzner continues:
I've been thinking a lot about the things that make Firefox popular. It's obviously more than the sum of our features, since there are other browsers that include more features in the default install. We've known that for a while, though. The popularity of Firefox compared to Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey) clearly proved that the design maxim of "less is more" applies to more than just interior decorating. However, people do love their pet features, so I don't think that being a small-footprint, tightly-focused browser is the only thing that drives Firefox's popularity.
Overall, the download statistics for both IE7 and Firefox are simply a way to create PR for the respective companies. As many of you have pointed out, it's not uncommon for users to run multiple browsers on their systems. While the statistics give us some cool insight into how much interest surrounds the browsers, they don't paint a clear picture as to how many people are actually using the software. Over the next few months, usage numbers will start showing up on the web, and that's when we will see just how successful the two new releases have been.
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