Firefox 3 downloads set Guinness World Record

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 03 July 2008 05:07

Business IT - Open Source

Some of the statistics for the record attempt issued by Mozilla are impressive: a total of 83T was served, with a peak throughput of 20 gigabits per second across the network of mirrors.

Peak activity reached 17,000 downloads a minute, with sustained rates of over 4000 per minute.

Even if the Firefox community did manage to set an official record, While that's a lot of activity, Adobe platform evangelist Ryan Stewart cast doubt on its significance, claiming http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1444 that Flash Player is installed 8 million times on an average day.

Guinness World Records, previously The Guinness Book of Records, was founded in the mid 1950s by the brewery as a way of settling pub arguments. It was originally compiled by Ross and Norris McWhirter. In recent years it has shown a tendency to recognise artificial records (such as the most software dowmloads in one day), with less attention being paid to the natural world and relatively traditional fields of human endeavour.