Posted on 07/02/2008 8:28:32 PM PDT by goldstategop
Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.
The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0 took place in June with parties in over 25 countries.
"The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen" said Marketing head Paul Kim.
Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it "an extremely impressive accomplishment".
The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted.
Mr Kim told the BBC: "The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea.
"It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world."
Marketing manager Mary Colvig said no party is planned to celebrate the record until the actual certificate is presented by Guinness World Records in London next week.
"Here at Mozilla headquarters (in Mountain View) I think most of us are just going to try and get to bed early now that we have the confirmation. We are all tired."
Security flaw
On launch day some of the shine was taken by security firms claiming to have found the first flaws in the new software.
Within five hours of Firefox 3.0 making its debut, DV Labs/Tipping Point reported a flaw that potentially let an attacker take over a PC if a user clicks on a booby-trapped link.
Mr Kim told the BBC "Firefox users are safe. We have a patch in the works and hope to release it very soon."
mozilla hq at end of the download day Mozilla says the number of downloads surpassed their expectations
Another potentially disastrous glitch ahead of the world record attempt came when servers handling the downloads collapsed under the weight of visitors checking to see if the new version of the browser was available.
Once they were all up and running the clock started counting down.
At their busiest the servers were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute. Within five hours the number of downloads for Version 3.0 exceeded the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006.
Market share increase
Another boost for the open source browser comes with the announcement that it has boosted its market share to over 19% making it the second most popular browser after Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or IE.
Net Applications says a chunk of the gain seems to have come from rival IE, although much of the growth came in users upgrading.
The company said while IE reached a record low last month, it predicted Firefox will break the 20% share bar sometime this month.
Mr Kim said "We offer the best browsing experience and this shows people are getting the message and voting with their browser choice."
Meanwhile Mozilla has shipped a high priority update for Firefox 2.0, warning that there are at least five serious vulnerabilities that could lead to code execution attacks.
Mr Kim said Mozilla will continue to support Firefox 2.0 until the middle of December.
After that users will be expected to switch over to Firefox 3.0 which since its launch over two weeks ago boasts 28 million downloads and counting.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I’m sticking with FF 2.x until more extensions are available for 3.
It’s the only browser I use. Internet Explorer is way to wormy for my liking.
Camino on the Mac, Firefox on the wintel box
I can’t even get my Yahoo toolbar back on FF3. Or the McAfee Site Advisor. Both are apparently now incompatible. And I tried switching back to FF2 in order to get them, but that doesn’t seem to work. They still won’t add on.
Posting with FF3 now. Overall I’m happy, nightly tester tools keeps my extensions working until they update. I’m not a fan of the new address bar functionality though.
official
I got it too.. I am part of this extremely historic Guiness (beer?) record.
so far no problems.. IE scares me
I have been using Firefox for some time now. But in the past week some very obvious changes have occured. I can no longer open YouTube links with Mozilla Firefox. A little box keeps coming up, saying:
“Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.”
So - I click the box to download the “NEW” version of Adobe’s Flash player - and get nothing.
Yesterday I sent to the trash, 20 icons from my start up page that were for installing “Adobe Flash Player”.
Something is very wrong and I don’t know what it is..........
So, I am forced to go back to IE.
Have been using FF 3 Beta 5 for a while.
Never figured out if the new one was new or not.
"Gooky"? "Sticky"?
Maybe "gooky" is like "kooky" and "geeky"?
But "sticky" is just Too Much Information...
Great news!!
I started using Firefox around 4 years ago, and haven’t looked back. I expect the Firefox increase of ‘market share’ to continue, because IE7 has to be the worst web browser I have ever seen.
I use Firefox from a jump drive. The only way to go.
Me too.
Ad Block Plus, NoScript, ReminderFox and Colorzilla. Must haves.
The folks at the link in reply #9 above will be happy to help you figure it out.
Tech PING!
The most interesting thing about that day was on the Firefox download website where it showed the #s of downloads over each country or place on a global map. All industrialized countries has decent showings; when I looked, only the USA was well into the millions, but North Korea had ZERO downloads. No other country had zero. Even some weird islands had more than that.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
I've heard about that. I've been a FF user for a while but right now I'm in no hurry to go to 3.0.
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