Right on the doorstep of releasing Firefox 3, Opera Software announced that their latest Opera web browser has reached 4.7 million downloads in five days.

In total Opera Software believes there are about 20 million Opera users, and 12 million Opera Mini users. Even if this total only represents 1% of the world, in real numbers it still is a huge group of people.

Currently Firefox 3 is trying to pull a record and is steadily going for the 8 million or so downloads in one full day. Of course Firefox 3 has a stronger marketing campaign, with the help of Google and volunteers. But nonetheless Opera 9.5 did pretty well, in fact, compared with the original launch in 2006 of Opera 9 the numbers of downloads is twice as high as before.

Let's hope that both browser remain to gain new users from Internet Explorer and break the dominance once and for all, as both alternative web browsers deserve recognition around the globe.

Update: Firefox 3 has a record of 8+ million downloads in 24 hours. Grats to Mozilla for reaching this record. Say if we calculate it for another five days more it would result in roughly 42 million downloads. Let's see if that's possible in the coming days.