Download Day for Firefox 3.5 is decidedly more understated than 3.0 was. A lot less hype prior to the release, no spectacular outages, and a respectable 1M+ dowloads so far, which is nice, but way behind Firefox 3.0’s Guiness Record.
Blog visitor stats are very biased metrics, they tend to lean towards the “new and cool” stuff, so they don’t represent real browser market share. That said, since I provided 3.0 Dowload Day Progress, let’s do a little comparison. Barely halfway through Download Day, 40% of my readers were already using Firefox 3.0. It became the top browser in a matter of hours.
Where do we stand today? Firefox is clearly in the lead, with a total of 56%, but only 16% upgraded to 3.5 yet.
The upgrade experience was smooth – a welcome departure from 3.0, and most of my extensions work even after the upgrade. The two notable exemptions, just because what they are and who their creator is are:
- Google Gears – disabled for not being compatible with 3.5
- … drumroll … the next one is:
- Mozilla’s Very Own Prism!
This one is hard to believe, but true.
That said, Firefox 3.5 is decidedly faster than any other release before – while there will be loads of detailed benchmarks, I’m quite happy with a subjective gut feel, that says it is on par with Google Chrome.
Of course that creates a dilemma of what to do when Chrome starts supporting extensions. 
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I tried upgrading to 3.5 and it said the download would take over 2 hours!!! I switched to K-Meleon for the speed and it looks like I’ll stay there for now.
That sounds like dialup speed 🙁