Firefox breaks download record

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 3 Jul 2008 at 08:53

Mozilla has set a new world record for the number of software downloads in 24 hours, after 8,002,530 people grabbed a copy of Firefox 3 on its release day.

"As the arbiter and recorder of the world's amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla's achievement to our archives," says Gareth Deaves, records manager for Guinness World Records.

"Mobilising over 8 million internet users within 24 hours is an extremely impressive accomplishment and we would like to congratulate the Mozilla community for its hard work and dedication," he continues.

Within hours of releasing the software over 14,000 people a minute were downloading the 7MB file, placing a 13Gb/sec strain on the organisation's servers which subsequently crashed for two hours.

"The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!)," said a posting on the Mozilla blog at the time.

Despite this setback an impressive number of downloads were successful, although a record of some description was rather inevitable as no previous record existed.

Ten days after the launch of the software over half of the Firefox users visiting our site were using the latest version, while three out of ten people were still using an old version of Internet Explorer, 18 months after the launch of version 7.