On Friday, 3/25, the download count topped 20 million

That’s an impressive daily run rate so far. Already at just after 9 AM CDT (-06:00 UCT) the daily average is over 6 million for the first four days, and with 15 hours left to go in that day, it could conceivably wind up somewhere between 7 and 8 million per day by the time the clock hits midnight (a straight-line extrapolation says it will be just over 7 million but that doesn’t factor any acceleration in). But the current tally clearly demonstrates that the daily rate is accelerating from day 1, and might conceivably go as high as 175% of the first day’s numbers by the end of today, day 4. This may not wind up as high as the 8 million copies of Firefox 3 downloaded in 2008 on its first day outing, but it’s certainly sustaining itself quite nicely.

In seeking to explain why Firefox is zooming past IE9, the aforecited PC Mag article provide an entirely credible hypothesis that with over half of all PC users still running Windows XP, Firefox 4 has a much bigger audience than IE 9, which runs only on PCs with Windows Vista or Windows 7 installed (Vista’s market share is now just over 11% and Windows 7 is clocking in at just over 23%, but XP still enjoys a market share of over 55%, according to today’s Operating System Market Share numbers at Netmarketshare.com). What that really means is that the total percentage of users that Firefox 4 can reach is almost three times as large as the one IE 9 can serve. Seems like an entirely plausible analysis to me!

I’m running Firefox 4 on several machines now, and I already like it much better than version 3.6.3 I had been running previously. It’s more streamlined, and much faster than its predecessor. With snappy svelte new versions of Chrome, IE 9, and Firefox 4 all recently on the streets, the browser game has certainly picked up lately, hasn’t it?