Pints of Guinness all 'round! 8.3 million Firefox 3 downloads

The early estimates from the Mozilla organization show its servers (when they were up and running) cranked out enough bytes to cover 11.07 million downloads of Firefox 3.0, and were registering as many as 283 downloads per second.

Server admins, do not try this at home. The 24-hour downloading extravaganza for Firefox 3.0 closed up shop yesterday with nearly 2.58 million downloads from the US alone, almost 663,000 from Germany, 403,000 from Japan, 295,000 from the UK, and 290,000 from France.

Since the 1:00 pm EDT download period closed, that number has kept rising. By 5:10 pm EDT this afternoon, SpreadFirefox.com (the organization's marketing arm) reported 9,026,760 downloads worldwide, with 2,754,008 in the US, 784,234 in Germany, 242,265 in Canada, and 17 in Turkmenistan.

What does this mean in terms of turnover; how is FF3 affecting the Internet? According to a Net Applications report, by 4:00 pm EDT Wednesday afternoon, 3.38% of all the world's Web browsers were putting out HTTP requests that identified themselves as Firefox 3. That's down from a peak of 4.3% recorded at 9:00 pm EDT this morning.

A dispatch sent by Mozilla to BetaNews this afternoon reports its servers gave out about 83 terabytes of data in the 24-hour period, with one mirror sending data at speeds of 20 Gbps.