Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0 took place in June 2008 with parties in over 25 countries.

"The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen. The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world.", said Marketing head Paul Kim.

Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it "an extremely impressive accomplishment".
The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted.

Marketing manager Mary Colvig said no party is planned to celebrate the record until the actual certificate is presented by Guinness World Records in London next week.

On launch day some of the shine was taken by security firms claiming to have found the first flaws in the new software.

Within five hours of Firefox 3.0 making its debut, DV Labs/Tipping Point reported a flaw that potentially let an attacker take over a PC if a user clicks on a booby-trapped link.
Another potentially disastrous glitch ahead of the world record attempt came when servers handling the downloads collapsed under the weight of visitors checking to see if the new version of the browser was available.

At their busiest the servers were handling more than 9,000 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.

Another boost for the open source browser comes with the announcement that it has boosted its market share to over 19% making it the second most popular browser after Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or IE.

Net Applications says a chunk of the gain seems to have come from rival IE, although much of the growth came in users upgrading.

The company said while IE reached a record low last month, it predicted Firefox will break the 20% share bar sometime this month.

Mr Kim said "We offer the best browsing experience and this shows people are getting the message and voting with their browser choice."

Meanwhile Mozilla has shipped a high priority update for Firefox 2.0, warning that there are at least five serious vulnerabilities that could lead to code execution attacks.

Mr Kim said Mozilla will continue to support Firefox 2.0 until the middle of December 2008.
After that users will be expected to switch over to Firefox 3.0 which since its launch over two weeks ago boasts 28 million downloads and counting.