Though the early Tuesday launch of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.5 browser was a comparatively low-key affair - as compared to the hyped advertising of its predecessor Firefox 3.0 last summer -, the Mozilla real-time tracking utility has revealed that there had been nearly 2 million worldwide downloads of the new browser by late Tuesday afternoon (Pacific time).

The newly-launched Firefox 3.5 is available for download in 58 languages in Windows, Mac and Linux editions. The existing Firefox users can go in for an update by clicking “Check for Updates” under the “Help” menu.

The browser’s download rate, almost 80 per second, is momentous considering the fact that Firefox director Mike Beltzner said: “We didn't do as much outreach this time!” Last year, Mozilla’s aggressive promotion of Firefox 3.0 browser had seen over 8.3 million downloads in the first 24 hours of its launch.

As per the statistics from Mozilla's real-time download counter, downloads of Firefox 3.5 browser were the maximum in the US – which had almost 600,000 downloads - by 3:35 p.m. Pacific; followed by Germany with over 260,000 downloads; France with 110,000; and the UK with almost 90,000 downloads.

The July 1 data from Internet metrics firm Net Applications would confirm the growth of the new Firefox browser – which during its preview version in May accounted for a mere 0.19 percent of all browsers!