Mozilla Sets World Record for Most Downloads With 8 Million

The results are in; the downloads have been counted and verified to bring you a result we’ve known for weeks was coming: Mozilla has successfully made the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in 24 hours.

Mozilla announced at the end of May that the company was shooting for a Guinness World Record with its latest Firefox, version 3.0, and provided ideas on how one could encourage friends to download Firefox within those 24 hours as part of “download parties.”

Mozilla whipped us into a frenzy over the release of the updated browser, while some people raised eyebrows when the record attempt had overloaded the download servers. That’s right, so many eager souls tried to download Firefox 3 that the Mozilla servers ground to a halt and for periods of time through out the day, eager users couldn’t download the update at all.

Well, despite that little hiccup, Mozilla has “officially” announced the record via its website, stating that over 8 million people downloaded the release in the first 24 hours.

“Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web.”

Mozilla experienced another bump in the Firefox 3 road in the form of a security vulnerability just hours after it was released. The day Mozilla shipped, Tipping Point announced that its researchers had already found a vulnerability in the browser. While the company said it would not disclose any details of the bug before Mozilla had released a patch, it rated the vulnerability as “high” and said it affected both versions 2 and 3 of Firefox. Mozilla is investigating the vulnerability and working on a patch.