the new year's firefox download spike

This chart shows the last two weeks of downloads. Each blue bar represents one day of Firefox 1.0 downloads. The first week is fairly representative of what we've seen for Firefox downloads over the last month or so. The second week, which shows a spike of about 20-25%, covers January second through yesterday.

Several possible explanations have been posted to the blog comments from my earlier post. I suspect that it's some of all of those (with the possible exception of attributing hundreds of thousands of extra downloads to Will Chatham's wearing his Firefox t-shirt ;-) We certainly did see some good press in early January, and it certainly seems reasonable that people got some good advice from family members around the holiday visits and now they're returning to work and school to follow up on that advice.