Firefox 3 downloads set Guinness World Record

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 03 July 2008 05:07

Business IT - Open Source

Guinness World Records has validated Mozilla's attempt to set a record for the number of software downloads in a 24 hour period. The official count of Firefox 3 downloads was 8,002,530.

Firefox 3 was launched on June 18, 2008, and the record attempt was arranged to spur early adoption and to draw attention to the new browser.

Only manually-initiated downloads from Mozilla's network of mirror sites were counted in the attempt, so anyone auto-updating from a beta version was not counted.

The unofficial count on the day was approximately 8.3 million, with the biggest contributions coming from the US, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, France, Iran, Italy, Canada, and Poland.

Australia put in a decent showing on a per-capita basis, with well over 100,000 downloads counting towards the record.

The current download count is over 28 million, and Net Applications' hour-by-hour reports show Firefox 3 has a web share of around 4 percent, though its 'quality assured' figures for the month of June gave it a 2.31 percent share, with Firefox 2 on 16.13 percent. Those figures are consistent, as Firefox 3 was released in the second half of the month.

Mozilla claims a total of more than 160 million Firefox users.

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