Opera today announced that the latest version of its browser, Opera 10, was downloaded 10 million times during the first week after its release. On its first day of release, Opera registered around 2 million downloads, up from 580,000 when the company released Opera 9 in 2006. Opera 10 launched to generally positive reviews and the company is already working on the next iteration of Opera 10, which will includeOpera Unite, a web server and a number of web services that users will host on their own desktops.
Firefox, in comparison, saw about 5 million downloads during the first 24 hours after the release of Firefox 3.5 and 20 million after the first week.
Looking at StatCounter‘s browser data, it doesn’t look like this release had real any influence on Opera’s global market share yet, but in Europe, Opera went from around 6.5% on September 1st to 7.5% today, and in the US, Opera went from 0.65% to 8%. In September 2008, Opera was hovering around 0.5% in the US, so the company has definitely seen some nice growth over the last year, even though in September 2008, it was also immediately overtaken by the newly released first beta of Google Chrome.
