By my rough estimates, we achieved just above 3.5 million downloads in the first week of the Firefox 1.0 release. Averaging half a million downloads a day for the first 7 days is simply amazing!
With 1.0 we had just over a million downloads on the first day. To have something to compare to, the best single day of downloads that we had with the Preview Release was around 300,000 and it took us more than three weeks to top 3.5 million downloads.
Another interesting comparison point is that while we broke a million downloads in a single day, Apple's long-awaited iTunes for Windows took more than three days to achieve its first million downloads. We're on fire!
This is so exciting! Keep spreading the word!
Posted by asa at November 16, 2004 09:02 AMHey Asa, I have some comments and questions pertaining to this for you.
1) www.spreadfirefox.com is pinging fine now, but the site isn't responding. It was last night.
2) You said, "the best single day of downloads that we had with the Preview Release was around 300,000", yet also the first day got just over 1 million downloads. Wouldn't that first day be the best single day?
3) How often is the download counter updated? I thought for sure it was updated a few times per day during PR, now (other than downtime) it seems to be more like once a day or so.
4) For PR, I remember 2 million in 10 days and 7 million in 7 weeks. What was the final count in how many weeks right before 1.0 released? I'd like to gauge the 1.0 download count at various spans of time from day 1, compared to PR.
Posted by: pepp5 on November 16, 2004 09:39 AMAs for question number two, pepp5, Firefox 1.0 had one million downloads in the first day, not the Preview Release.
Posted by: Jonathan Horak on November 16, 2004 09:44 AMThat's not really a fair comparison - Apple *sold* one million songs in 3 days, while Firefox got 1 million free downloads in 1 day.
Posted by: Joe on November 16, 2004 09:47 AMJonathan, you're right. Doh. I got some sentence dyslexia going on there.
Okay here is a summary of what we know so far about download counts, per Asa's blogs and my own recollection:
For PR,
0.3 million in 1 days
0.5 million in 2 days
1 million in 4 days
2 million in 10 days
7 million in 49 days (7 weeks)
For 1.0 so far:
1 million in 1 days
2 million in 2 days
3.5 million in 7 days
How many downloads did Mozilla (seamonkey) 1.0 have the first day?
Posted by: David Tenser on November 16, 2004 10:13 AM"On Monday Apple announced that more than a million copies of the ITunes for Windows software had been downloaded in the first three days following the software's release."
Asa was referring to this line, Joe.
Posted by: Hunter on November 16, 2004 10:19 AMJoe, I think Asa means iTunes itself was downloaded 1 million times in 3 days, rather than selling 1 million songs in 3 days. Speaking of which, Do They Know It's Christmas, the Band Aid charity song, took a week to sell 1 million copies.
Posted by: Greg K Nicholson on November 16, 2004 10:21 AMDavid, I can't remember what the exact number was. I think it was around 200K downloads on the first day.
--Asa
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on November 16, 2004 10:53 AMI think that number of downloads is a good promotional point. Here's the banner I made: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/5705
Posted by: Ivan Icin on November 16, 2004 04:30 PMI downloaded the so called Firefox to my Mac OS X, and no disk image anywhere. Just some file called download.mozilla.org. My trusty Mac thinks it's a text file. Am I an ignoramu? What gives?
Posted by: Billyfish on November 17, 2004 06:38 AM