Firefox 3 hits Guinness World Record target

Mozilla has achieved its ambitious plans for the recent launch of Firefox 3.0 and set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

The record was set at 8,002,530 downloads of the latest version of its web browser. The grand Download Day took place between 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008.

You may be wondering who held the previous record for most software downloads in 24 hours. Disappointingly, it seems that no one did, or at least not officially. None the less, Download Day was almost marred when the sheer weight of the eager community brought down the site, causing a two hour launch delay.

Despite there being over 180 million Firefox users across the world, Firefox remains at number 2 in the browser market behind, you guessed it, Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is certainly not going to be an easy one to dislodge from that top spot, seeing as it is integrated within the most popular operating systems in the world, but with the increasing popularity of free OSs, even that may change someday.

I wonder if anything will ever be able to beat Firefox 3’s world record (other than Firefox 4)? Although the growth of the internet should theoretically make it easier for future software to reach even more users, there are few apps that really have the same global appeal. What’s more, with applications increasingly moving away from the computer to being web-based, we may never again see actual downloads being so ubiquitous.

If you want to take a guess though, you’re more than welcome. May be Apple could do it with a new version of iTunes, or Google if it ever makes a desktop OS. Thoughts?

Mozilla

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