Firefox 3 on track for a Guinness World Record

With twelve hours of Mozilla’s Download Day left to go, the browser has been downloaded 4.3 million times by users from around the world -- a figure that is growing at the rate of 11,000 downloads per minute, according to Mozilla’s download counter.

Australia has contributed 70,560 downloads to the global total, the U.S. has contributed 1.9 million, and countries such as Germany, the U.K., France, Brazil, Iran and Japan have topped 100,000 downloads each.

When Download Day commenced at 11.16am PDT yesterday (4.16am on 18 June in Sydney), a staggering rate of downloads caused a server slowdown.

At its peak, traffic for Firefox 3 hit 14,000 downloads per minute, accounting for 13Gbps in download traffic, the company said.

Only downloads that are human-initiated, “fully and completely transmitted” will be counted for the Guinness World Records attempt, according to FAQ on Mozilla’s Download Day Web site.

The company plans to identify and discard duplicate downloads with the help of a cookie system and has advised users to only download one copy of Firefox per computer.

Firefox currently holds a 28.8 percent share of the browser market, according to March figures from Web survey firm XitiMonitor.

The latest version of Firefox will support the browser’s “slow but steady” market share growth, and includes features such as built-in anti-malware, more intuitive search, a new download manager and improved customisation.

Already, downloads of Firefox 3 have far surpassed those of its predecessor Firefox 2, which was downloaded 1.6 million times on its launch day.

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