Mozilla: 1.6 million downloads and counting

Early Tuesday evening, the Mozilla organization gave BetaNews an update on its quest to have posted the single most downloaded (tracked) software item in a single day, having exceeded Firefox 2's single-day mark in just five hours' time.

As BetaNews confirmed this afternoon, the worldwide usage share of all Web browsers declaring themselves as Firefox 3.0 in HTTP requests, catapulted by 265% between 11:00 am and 6:00 pm EDT today, according to independent data compiled live by analysis firm Net Applications, from 0.96% to 2.54%. That means nearly one Web browser in 40 worldwide is using Firefox 3, as of Tuesday evening.

However, another analysis firm, Netcraft, confirmed what we were seeing ourselves at mid-afternoon: Servers for Mozilla.com and the SpreadFirefox.com marketing arm of Mozilla were sporadically unavailable for a period of time extending from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm EDT. By 7:15, however, both appeared to be operational; and a Mozilla spokesperson told us "they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads."