Firefox 3 Exceeds 2.9 Million Downloads In First 8 Hours

It appears that Mozilla has easily achieved its goal to set a new Guinness world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. Despite the fact that the download pages were virtually not reachable for several hours after the software was officially released at 1:16 PM EDT today (we actually found it posted on Mozilla’s FTP server at 1:31 PM EDT), lots of download requests apparently were successful.Eight hours after the release of the software, the download counter stood at almost 2.92 million downloads. Mozilla’s own goal was to hit more than 1.6 million Firefox downloads within 24 hours to set a Guinness world record. Firefox 2 was downloaded about 1.6 million within one day after launch. Mozilla said that it will take about one week to review download logs and validate the record attempt.So far, more than 1 million downloads came from the U.S., more than 100,000 from Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan, Spain and the UK.