After a shaky start to its launch effort, Firefox 3 was downloaded about 8.3 million times in its first 24 hours, according to John Lilly from the Mozilla team. That worked out to more than 83 terabytes of downloads served. John provided some other factoids from the launch:
(83 terabytes) works out to nearly 8 1/2 full copies of the US Library of Congress' print collection or a million copies of the new Coldplay album. At the peak, we were serving 17,000 downloads a minute (283 per second!), and saw sustained download rates in excess of 4,000/minute. Our peak mirror throughput during the period was 20 gigabits/sec.
By some accounts, Firefox 3 reached a 4 percent share of the Internet browser market in its first day or release.
