Mozilla is on Fire with Version 3

Julian Sharpe | 2:25 pm | June 19, 2008 | News

Mozilla has claimed a download record for the release of its latest uploaded to Firefox version 3 It is claimed that in the first 24 hours the web browser was made available the software was downloaded over eight million times. Currently statistics from the download servers are being reviewed to give an official figure that will then be passed to the Guinness World Record organisation.



However the attempt to set the download record was scheduled to begin at 1300 PST (2000 GMT) on 17 June was almost stopped from the start as the servers handling the downloads crashed under the volume of visitors checking to see if new version was available yet.

At their maximum level the servers were handling more than 9000 downloads per minute. Within five hours the number of downloads for Version 3.0 exceeded the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006.

In total Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times over the 24 hour record setting period. The figure beats the five million Mozilla predicted before the day.

Logs from the download servers have been handed to the Open Source Labs at Oregon State University for auditing. The scrutiny will ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads are not counted. The verification process could take a week to complete. The increase of interest in Firefox 3.0 has continued and Mozilla has reported that the software has now been downloaded more than 10 million times.