Tech bytes for tea?

The pent-up demand arising from the delay of its launch from November last year has resulted in a whopping 8.75 million downloads in the first 24-hours following its launch earlier this week on March 22.

It easily trounced the 2.35 million downloads that Internet Explorer 9 garnered in the first 24-hours of its launch just a week prior.

The number of Firefox 4 downloads in the first 24 hours surpassed the previous record set by Firefox 3 when the predecessor captured a cool 8 million downloads during the first 24 hours after its launch in June 2008.
Firefox 4 is available on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It supports Windows XP while IE9 doesn’t. Many observers see that as the main reason why it has drawn more than 3 times the number of downloads that IE9 recorded in its first 24 hours.

Windows XP accounts for more than 61 percent of all windows-based machines that went online in February, according to web metrics firm Net Applications.

While Mozilla has chided Microsoft for leaving Windows XP users stuck with the two-and-a-half year old IE8, the latter supports only Windows 7, Vista and Windows Server based PCs because it wants to leverage the more advanced technology available in these newer operating systems and does not want IE9 to be constrained by the older technology in 10-year-old Windows XP.

In the meantime, visit http://glow.mozilla.org/ for a live status of the number of Firefox 4 downloads worldwide.

And for some statistics of the market share of the various browsers, checkout this wikipedia page. Below are some download statistics updated from my earlier posting for the IE9 launch: