Firefox and Opera have both managed to clock five million downloads since release. Firefox achieved this in less than a day compared to five days taken by Opera. But, even then its a major achievement for Opera which has about 1/10th Firefox’s marketshare. In fact number of Opera users have doubled since release of v9. According to internal estimates Opera browser is being used by 20 million people on the desktop. Add this to 12 million Opera mini users and a significant number of users using it on high end mobile handsets (Opera Mobile), NintendoDS, Nintendo Wii etc and it would mean total number of Opera users is actually a lot more than you would expect.

Opera is currently holding a “Tell a friend” competition and if hoping that Opera fans would help in spreading the word. The first prize is XO OLPC Laptop (not yet released), the second prize is Nintendo Wii and the third prize is a mobile phone. More details about the contest is available here.

But today is Firefox’s day and lets get back to firefox. Firefox v3 has already been downloaded more than 8 million times and the download counter is still ticking at an unbelievable rate. Earlier today Microsoft sent the Firefox team a cake (with prominent IE logo) congratulating them on the successful launch. Of course this is nothing new. Microsoft had sent over a similar when when Firefox v2 was launched. And more infamously had dropped a huge IE logo in Netscape’s lawn after Internet Explorer v4 was released (but this is definitely a lot friendlier). Here’s the cake Internet Explorer Team sent to Firefox :