Officially released by Mozilla last Tuesday, it has now emerged that Firefox 3.5, the latest release of the most popular open source web browser has seen a staggering 5 million downloads in the first 24 hours of its release. While this figure is lower than the 8 million downloads that Firefox 3 experienced, it nevertheless underscores the sheer popularity that Firefox enjoys--or the stranglehold of its plug-ins.

In fact, tracking firms says that Firefox 3.5 by itself accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of the browser market, barely a week after release--and more than the total market share of rival Opera. At the moment, the collective downloads of Firefox is expected to exceed one billion by the end of August.

For more on this story:
- check out this article [1] at Ars Technica

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