The BBC website has reported that Mozilla's recent launch of the updated Firefox Internet browser has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The confirmed record breaking figure of 8,002,530 downloads took place in June as existing and new Firefox users avidly took to the new version of the browser, which has also taken on a revised look.

Mozilla had promoted the world record attempt on its website and download page. There were some initial problems when the servers handling the downloads failed under the weight of visitors checking to see if the new version of the browser was available. However, once the servers were working and supplying the downloads they were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute at the peak. Within five hours the number of downloads for Version 3.0 exceeded the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006.

Apart from this record breaking event, the more significant issue is that Firefox continues to gain in popularity as an Internet browser favoured against Microsoft's established Internet Explorer and this event will have no doubt helped the spread and awareness of Firefox. The market share for this browser is now at 19% according to the latest figures and Mozilla expect to reach a 20% share of the market within the next month as there have now been 28 million downloads of the software since the recent launch.