ScitechBOX Science and Technology News Box

Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

After a rocky start to its Firefox 3 "Download Day," Mozilla logged more than 8 million downloads of the latest version of its Web browser in 24 hours, the company said Wednesday.

Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,349,074 times between 2:16 p.m. ET Tuesday and 2:16 p.m. ET Wednesday-- more Firefox downloads than the company has ever had in one day, according to a Mozilla Web site tracking the browser's first-day download process.

Mozilla said on May 28 that it would attempt to establish a Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period with Firefox 3's release.

As part of the plan, Mozilla deemed Tuesday Download Day and hosted a download party at its Mountain View, California, office.

In comparison, Firefox 2 was downloaded 1.6 million times in its first 24 hours of release; to date, it has been downloaded more than half a billion times, according to Mozilla. There was no Download Day fanfare surrounding Firefox 2's release, however.

Mozilla is now awaiting review by the Guinness judges to see if its goal was accomplished, according to the Download Day Web site. There is currently no record for the number of software downloads in 24 hours; Mozilla's would be the first.

Despite its eventual success, Firefox 3 Download Day didn't go off without a hitch. Interest in the endeavor crippled Mozilla's servers on Tuesday, so the U.S. part of the download process started around 3 p.m. ET-- two hours later than originally planned-- when Mozilla's site wouldn't work properly.

The European leg of the effort began a little more than an hour later than planned and marked the start of the download-logging process. There were no more problems reported once the U.S. site was back up and running.