Mozilla blog reports success (updated)

Once the software became available at 10am PDT, it was off to the races for Mozilla.  From their blog:

“It’s been an awesome morning and afternoon here at Mozilla headquarters. We launched Firefox 3 this morning and immediately felt the love from millions of people all over the world joining us to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in 24 hours.”

I guess so- they exceeded the first day downloads of Firefox 2 after just five hours with 1.6 million downloads and were serving 9,000 downloads a minute at the time of posting.

Final numbers for the first day are not yet available, but expected to be in the 5-7 million range.

Update: Firefox 3 was downloaded 8.3 million times over 24 hours.  That’s 83 terabytes!

John Lilly, Mozilla Foundation CEO, says that equates to a 4% market share of browsers worldwide on day one.