Firefox Grabs Official World Record for Most Downloads in a Day
PostTime : Thursday, 03 July 2008
| Posted by : DigitalWeekly
| Author : Shane McGlaun
Last month’s release of Firefox 3 marked the latest iteration of the second
most popular browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. To mark the occasion,
the Firefox 3 team looked to set a world record for the number of downloads in
a day.
Firefox 3 was a shoe-in to set the Guinness World Record for most software
downloads in a day since the record didn’t previously exist. The record
was made official today with Guinness certifying that Firefox 3 was
downloaded 8,002,530 times in the first 24 hours of its launch. That number
weeds out all duplicate downloads and automated downloads.
Even though Firefox 3 holds the record for most downloads in a day, it still
holds a fraction of the browser market that number one Internet Explorer has.
According to The Wall Street Journal Firefox held 19.03% of the browser
market in June while Internet Explorer captured 73% of the total browser
market.
Firefox and other browsers are gaining ground on Microsoft-- albeit slowly.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Internet Explorer lost about half
a percentage point of market share per month for the last 12 months.
Mozilla announced
its record setting attempt with much pomp and fanfare on June 17 and to
commemorate the occasion the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft even sent
over a cake.