Firefox 4 First-Day Downloads Outstrip IE9's, Fall Short of Firefox 3 Record

Firefox 4 was released yesterday, with a sleeker look and new synching and privacy features. The new version is between two and six times faster than previous releases, by Mozilla’s count.

According to Mozilla’s official counter page, Firefox 4 has been downloaded more than seven million times so far. Impressive, but its first-day numbers were still short of the Firefox 3 release in June 2008, which actually earned a Guinness World Record for tallying eight million downloads in 24 hours. By comparison, Microsoft said its Internet Explorer 9, released last week, was downloaded 2.35 million times in its first 24 hours.

Update: Mozilla has now compiled its official 24-hour download count:

Within 24 hours of Firefox 4 being announced it had been downloaded 7.1 million times, this is in addition to the more than 3 million people who were already running the release candidate that became our final version

Note: screenshot is from a little more than 24 hours after official release.

Firefox faces ever-increasing competition in the browser market, though browser users do seem to be creatures of longtime habit. Internet Explorer was still the leading global browser as of February 2011, with 45.4 percent market share, according to StatCounter. It was followed by Firefox with 30.4 percent and Google Chrome with 16.5 percent.