Just in case we needed more news about the Firefox-Internet explorer battle, we have some numbers on the downloads of each of the recently released browsers.

There are some interesting numbers according to a member of the Mozilla team:

Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.

There are also some interesting numbers concerning the various releases of Firefox which appear to indicate increasing popularity. The number of downloads within the first 24 hours has steadily increased from one version to the next.

• Firefox 1.0: 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours
• Firefox 1.5: 1.5 million downloads in the first 24 hours
• Firefox 2: 2 million (actually slightly more) people using Firefox 2 in the first 24 hours

The obvious joke here, is that it is clear how Mozilla comes up with its version numbering scheme for Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7 saw some respectable numbers as well, according to the Internet Explorer blog:

In the first four days over three million of you have already downloaded the final release.

Now I’m curious as to what the numbers were for Firefox within the first four days.