Finally we can bring the curtains down on the whole Firefox download world record thing because it has been announced that they have officially broken the record. When Mozilla announced it was to release the third incarnation of its popular Firefox browser, they clearly decided to go all out in a bid to make it an even greater contender to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Download parties were planned all around the world, and Mozilla announced that it intended to break the world record for the most number of downloads for a single program in a 24 hour period. It’s taken over a week to verify the logs and download data, removing duplicate and failed downloads from the count, but it was announced today that there were officially 8,002,530 downloads in what was almost the first 24 hours.
We say almost because, when the record was supposed to first be attempted, the overwhelming scramble to download Firefox 3.0 caused the servers to pack up. However, service was resumed shortly afterwards and the record attempt began again. It may have seemed like overkill and it was certainly an off the wall idea but to the marketing and PR departments much kudos is due because it definitely worked.
