We are expecting successful browser launches to score somewhere north of 5 million downloads on their first day. But then, Firefox 4.0 is not launched as a final and 100,000 downloads for a first beta is a respectable result.
The news was shared by Mike Beltzner, the Firefox man in charge at Mozilla, via his Twitter feed. “It’s only been out for a day, and we’ve got about 100,000 people using Firefox 4 Beta as their daily browser,” Beltzner wrote.
Mozilla released the browser earlier today with a newly designed and streamlined user interface. However, Firefox 4 does not sport the promised speed improvements such as D2D acceleration as well as the new Jaegermonkey JavaScript engine yet.
The new, reduced interface of Firefox 4.0
Mozilla originally said that it plans on releasing the final version of Firefox 4 sometime in October, but it appears that this date may slip by a few days or weeks. Meanwhile, Microsoft is preparing to launch Beta 1 of IE9 next month.
As far as we can see now, it may be a tight race between IE9 and FF4 as far as JavaScript and D2D acceleration is concerned. The Webkit browsers Chrome and Safari as well as Opera 10.6 have the edge in JavaScript performance, but they do not support hardware acceleration yet.
