Firefox 3 Hits World Record

Firefox's set a world download record with the release of Firefox 3 with 8.3 million downloads, but it hit a bump because of the heavy demand on servers, slowing downloads to treacle for a while.

They were going for the gol d and they got it, unofficially recording 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours. But Mozilla’s attempt to hit that goal with the release of Firefox 3 yesterday might have been hindered, ironically, by the sheer demand for the product.

The launch began at 10am Pacific time, and there were soon 14,000 downloads a minute, at 13Gb a second, according to Vnunet, who reported that by 12.30 pm, the download speed was down to a very sluggish 5kb a second, and one of Firefox’s three sites, spreadfirefox.com, had gone down.

However, all was not lost. It came back up, and Mozilla reported that there were around 8,000 downloads a minute, with a one-day estimate of between five and seven million downloads.

Paul Kim, Mozilla’s vice president of product marketing, said in a statement:

"Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through, but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads."

With that 8.3 million download total, Firefox beat it’s own goal by three million, and the word record is theirs – although, to be fair, none existed before. John Lilly, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, claims this gives Firefox a 4% browser market share.