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>> I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com, welcome to the Daily Debrief. Senior writer Stephen Shankland is our guest today, and we are talking about Firefox 3 downloads which has clearly hit the one million mark.
>> Oh, it's the 7.7 million mark in less than 24 hours. >> And we still have some time to go to--to count the downloads.
>> One more hour still before they end the official 24-hour period over which they are trying to set a record--Mozilla is.
>> Well, the record is being set because there was no previous record to break, is that right?
>> Right. This is a--it wasn't that hard, but somebody has to pay attention to numbers pretty carefully and document it.
>> And this--these numbers are despite the fact that the--it did crash for a bit yesterday?
>> Yeah, well, conveniently they started the 24-hour clock after the servers recovered, so Mozilla--they primed the pump well. They got a lot of people to say, you know, put little badge on their websites saying, you know, "Download Day is the 17th." And so a lot of people came to hit the site to get that new software and it--it went down pretty hard for a pretty long time. So almost 2 hours here in the US. And, but once it did get back up, the downloads took off. So they were going at a peak rate of 14,000 downloads per minute, which is 230-something per second. So, they were delivering a lot of copies of that software.
>> Were you expecting this kind of popularity, this kind of support, from the fanbase out there?
>> Well nobody knew exactly how much in terms of quantity, but it was pretty clear there was a lot of support for Firefox in general. People want to belong to something it seems to me. They want to feel like they're part of something, sort of like Apple, perhaps, where, Firefox--they feel like they're part of a community.
>> Sure.
>> Some--some inside group with cache, so--
>> Nerd cred.
>> Exactly, nerd cred.
>> Now I remember I was reading one of your posts and you were soliciting comments from our readers about why they like Firefox so much. What have you heard so far?
>> Well I got a lot of feedback from that. Clearly a lot of people like to talk about why the like Firefox. There are a lot of reasons.
>> Okay.
>> One is it's open source software. A lot of people are philosophically attached to open source software. Another is there is a lot of technology that's reasonable in Firefox. Some of it pioneering, and some of it is just very useful, like extensions. You can plug into Firefox to get it to do different things. And another one is, you know, tabbed browsing is a big thing. Standards compliance seems like a pretty basic thing, but a lot of the web developers out there really like Firefox because they can make the pages look the way they want them to look better. And then, of course, there's the anti-Microsoft sentiment. A lot of people love to hate Microsoft, and Firefox is a good way to stick it to the man. ^M00:02:34
>> Now let's talk market share. Firefox occupied about, what, 20 percent before this new--the third version, and now it's up to what would you say?
>> Well it's hard to say exactly yet how much overall--how much Firefox market share has changed.
>> okay.
>> But Firefox 3, in less than 24 hours, got more than 4 percent market share, which is pretty remarkable. That puts it within striking distance of Safari overall, and well past Opera. So, in--inside of 24 hours something like, you can say approximately a quarter of the Firefox users already had switched to the new version, which is a remarkable adoption rate.
>> And I'm sure you have already weeks ago, right?
>> I've been trained to release candidates, sure, and I switched over to Firefox yesterday. It works for me.
>> Alright, well I'm going to go download it myself. Thank you for your time Stephen. I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com. This has been the Daily Debrief. We'll see you next time.
>> Thanks. ^M00:03:23 [ Music ] ^E00:03:25
