Jun 18
2008The Download Day and the Iranian Record
Filed Under (Technology) by Sheern Tami on 18-06-2008
Tagged Under : 8 million downloads, Alexa, Firefox 3, Mozilla Foundation, The Download day
The Download day is over and it’s official now - more than 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours, that’s more Firefox downloads ever in a single day. What an overwhelming response from the Mozilla community. Now that’s a record breaker, I guess a few more days to go before Guinness reviews the record for “most downloadable software in a single 24 hour period” and hands over record breaker title to Firefox 3.
Firefox 3 is based on Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The browser features a cleaner layout, better bookmark handling and more stability. And it’s faster
As I was checking the countrywide download list, earlier during the day on http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord for the 8 million downloads, I noticed a few unexpected results. At the top of the list stood US with more than 2 Million downloads, a close second came Iran with a little over 250 K downloads which was closely followed by Canada with about 230 K downloads and Brazil with 176.000 downloads and China a little lesser than Brazil. I tried adding most of the countries on that list and trust me in no way it came to 8 million. I understand there must have been an unexpected error somewhere. The only reason why I believe so is because as I am writing this blog at 11:20 PM EST on June 18 2008, I tried looking for the countrywide download map again and I see download country list map has been set marked to zero (see attached image) for all counties. We all want to believe Mozilla is busy updating some records right now.
Another question that has been baffling me is, what could be the reason for this immense Iranian popularity of Firefox (see the attached Alexa rankings), I wish I could post the image of countrywide download map with Iran highlighted on it, unfortunately the worldwide counter has been set to zero on the map (see attached image).
I bet even the Mozilla Foundation won’t have an answer to this growing Iranian popularity and if they have then IE watch out the storm is coming your way.
Luckily, I was able to get the country wise download day images from yesterday, great that I had left http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ Page open on my work PC and luckily it wasn’t refreshed. here have a look at the images. And yes, it doesn’t end here, as of today, June 19 2008 9:50 EST we have new stats available for the countrywide download list
US - 3,344,865
Germany - 977,522
Japan - 646,286
United Kingdom - 427,640
Canada - 303,752
Poland - 269,855
Iran - 267,607
Brazil - 241,058
China - 238,334
Australia - 186,469
Yes, Iran does have a relatively large, vibrant, tech-savvy web community. Check Alexa for other websites’ country ranking. (e.g. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/spreadfirefox.com , Iranians are fifth users of SpreadFirefox.com in terms of number).
But well, Iran has an enthusiastic hacking community too! Since Iranian Firefox download rate has significantly dropped in the hours after the Download Day, I have become suspicious of the legitimacy of the Iranian record (Iran has dropped from 7th to 10th in rankings since Download Day finished). But still other than the rate, the absolute downloads number is not surprising to me; given approx. 20m internet users in Iran and the popularity of Firefox in Iranian tech community, 250k downloads in the Download Day isn’t a very big deal.
And have you noticed Lithuania? This small country with a total population of 3,369,000 has downloaded Firefox 340000 times (rank 7) since the beginning of download day! I think they hold the record on a per capita basis.
I found http://ehsanakhgari.org/mozilla/downloadday/stats/ which provides interesting Firefox 3 up-to-the-minute download stats (It says pledges while it actually provides downloads stats). It’s clear from there that Lithuania is by far the first country based on download-per-capita. The US is currently 14th and Iran is 46th.
I posed the question about the Lithuania popularity on my blog post http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/general/blog-potato/archives/lithuania-the-biggest-downloader-on-firefox-3-download-day-25453?e=rec
Commenters have pointed out a major Lithuanian news portal promoted the download in a prominent banner and this gave Lithuania a late surge. They are now approaching 10% of the population on Firefox 3 reaching 330K downloads.
فایرفاکس ۳ در ایران…
حتما همتون در جریان نسخههای دریافت شده از فایرفاکس ۳ هستید، بیشتر از اون چیزی که ما تعجب کردیم، جهانیان متعحب شدند!
واقعا این مساله …
The real number of internet users in Iran is 7 million, not 20m.
and that in Iran many IT newscasters and very popular weblogs among Iranians have announced the download day and discussed it, too.
it’s a fact that high rate of downloads just on download day in Iran may be because of enthusiasm of Iranians to hold a record, and of course, their interest to this great software.
cheers
An Iranian
Sounds like you guys are jealous that iranians broke the record by downloading nearly half a million copies of firefox, but sir, i have to inform you that Iran has more than 8 million Internet users across the country and, a very well educated and enthusiastic IT community which had been waiting for the launch day and had inform users. if you look at number of Persian blogs in the internet alone you would see a number dangling around 6 or 7 million blogs in farsi (including Iranians abroad) and there are 5 major blog services in farsi. This very well shows that the number of downloads are legitimate. Internet Networking is really active inside the country.
Maybe you should try to learn other countries before commenting on them, most of you guys are under influence of western media.
regards,
An Iranian from Toronto Canada
it was quite predictable that people in Iran would welcome new firefox properly .
if you search for “فایرفاکس” on google you’ll notice that there are so many blogs and Iranian websites who are following the progress of new firefox .
in addition to this , if you visit mozilla party web page , you’ll get surprised about amount of parties which’s going to held for new release of firefox in iran .
in addition to that I don’t think that bots can generate this amount of traffic for a whole country , I do have more faith in Mozilla engineers .
it was quite predictable that people in Iran would welcome new firefox properly .
if you search for “فایرفاکس” on google you’ll notice that there are so many blogs and Iranian websites who are following the progress of new firefox .
in addition to this , if you visit mozilla party web page , you’ll get surprised about amount of parties which’s going to held for new release of firefox in iran .
in addition to that I don’t think that bots can generate this amount of traffic for a whole country , I do have more faith in Mozilla engineers .
said : “Iranian Firefox download rate has significantly dropped in the hours after the Download Day”
Because the download day finished at 10:30 PM in iran timezone and this is time to sleep! and also thursday and friday is holiday in iran(instead of Saturday and sunday).
regards,
An Iranian
Iranian community on internet is very strong and they are active in open source aspects. Firefox, Ubuntu, Wordpress and other stuffs like these are popular in Iranian community and you can find some localized projects about them like Persian Firefox and Persian Wordpress.
only iran real download
عرضه ندارن دانلود کنن به ایرانی ها نهمت میزنن.
it’s obvious..just take a look at many comments from iran right here..iran is in the middle east,but iranians are not..
Number of Internet users in Iran is 18 million according “CIA’s Iran Factbook” not 7 or 8 millions. Considering the date of the estimate (2006) one can safely assume the number is 20 million or higher as Mohammad says.
I guess CIA Factbook is credible enough.
My estimate was based on http://www.internetworldstats.com/middle.htm and several governmental estimates. Perhaps the most reliable estimate was the October-November 2006 (Aban 1385 Jalali) census by Statistics Center of Iran which found that at that time 24% of Iranian households had computers, half of which (12%) used internet at home, which means roughly 9m users. Considering users at work, universities, etc and the increased usage since 2006 (since 2006 many of government services have gone solely online, e.g. Konkoor (university entrance exam) registration, gas rationing card, etc) I think that it’s safe to assume 20m users.
However, one should bear in mind that there are different interpretations of “internet user”, e.g. is someone who uses the internet only to register for Konkoor an internet user?