Guinness Confirms Firefox 3 Record

Tags: security hackers Internet Explorer Firefox Microsoft Mozilla Promise

By theWHIR.com , July 03, 2008
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By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

July 3, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Mozilla Foundation (mozilla.org) announced this week that it has tallied the numbers for its Firefox 3 browser's launch date at 8,002,530, setting an official Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a day.

The record - the first of its kind - was confirmed by GWR judges on Wednesday. Mozilla counted the number of software downloads after auditing and checking its servers to eliminate any possibilities of duplicate and unfinished downloads from the final figure.

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

Last month, Mozilla announced that Firefox 3 had surpassed 8 million downloads on its heavily publicized June 18 launch date, after an initial technical hiccup sent the Mozilla website temporarily offline.

Despite these high figures and holding a 19 percent market share of total web browser usage, competitor Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains an overpowering 73 percent share, according to stats tracker Net Applications.

Meanwhile, Firefox 3 still contains a yet-to-be-patched backdoor vulnerability that could potentially allow hackers to compromise a user's PC, as reported by security firms DV Labs and Tipping Point.

The open source developer said on Wednesday that is still working to resolve the security flaw. The company has also released patches for 13 bugs in previous version Firefox 2, five of which are listed as "critical".

Mozilla advised users of Firefox 2 this week that they should upgrade to version 3 and that support for version 2 would be discontinued in mid-December.