Mozilla gets 8.3 million downloads for Firefox 3

Mozilla has officially concluded its world record attempt for most downloads in a day, claiming it has served 8.3 million copies of Firefox 3 on launch day.

The actual number has still to be confirmed by Guinness, which will spend the next few weeks pouring over logs to verify the figures. However, Mozilla says it expects the official number which will go in the record books to be "a little lower a little lower as we weed out over counts over the next few weeks."

The campaign did not get off to an auspicious start, with the servers grinding to a halt for two hours under the strain of demand, however, once up and running Mozilla claims that at its peak it was serving 17,000 downloads a minute, or 283 per second.

While figures vary, it appears the US led the downloads charts, accounting for 2.6 million copies of the browser in the first 24 hours, followed by Germany with around 700,000, and Japan with 406,000. Initial estimates suggest the UK accounted for over 300,000 downloads.

Figures from metrics firm Net Applications indicate Firefox has managed to take a four per cent share of the market with its world record stunt, though there's a big difference between downloading Firefox and using it as your primary browser - or even installing it at all.

Mozilla, however, was jubilant: "So a good day's work by everyone involved," wrote chief executive John Lilly on his blog. "Like everything that's Mozilla, this involved people far beyond Mountain View, and far beyond the borders of any one company or group."