But Mozilla’s bandwidth took a battering.

It’s here at last. Firefox 3 was made available for download at 10 a.m Pacific time yesterday (that’s 6 p.m to us in the UK). Mozilla had urged users to download enmasse in order to set a world record for software download but this didn’t go without a hitch.

At peak, Mozilla was server around 14,000 downloads per minute which chewed up 13 Gb of bandwidth every second. HTTP traffic accounted for another 2Gb per second. Obviously, there were knock on effects. Downloads slowed to as little as 5Kb per second - hmm, dialup modem speeds!  Paul Kim, vice president of product marketing, said “Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning…” - really?

Estimates suggest that Firefox 3 was downloaded about 5 to 7 million times at the end of the first day.

Popularity: 6% [?]