Firefox frenzy concludes

At 11:18 AM US Pacific time, the 24 hour window for the record attempt closed with the unofficial tally standing at roughly 8.2 million copies of the browser.

The company will not learn whether or not it has broken the record for another week or so while Guiness World Records officials pore over download logs and verify the record attempt.

The record attempt got off to a shaky start Tuesday morning when the initial demand for the browser pushed Mozilla's servers offline for a short period of time. The company recovered and by mid-day, demand for Firefox three was pushing downloads as high as 14,000 per minute.

By mid-afternoon the traffic had slowed a bit, and Mozilla executives placed the estimate at 5-7 million downloads by the end of the attempt. Traffic remained strong through the evening, however, and the total eclipsed 8.2 million as the 24-hour period drew to an end.

"It’s been a very busy 24 hours for Mozilla folks around the world," said chief executive John Lilly.

"Like everything that’s Mozilla, this involved people far beyond Mountain View, and far beyond the borders of any one company or group."

More than a quarter of the total downloads came from the US. American users downloaded some 2.6 million copies of the browser in its first 24 hours. In second was Germany, with 738,000, followed by Japan, which logged just over 406,000 downloads.

The UK accounted for 313,000 Firefox downloads, while France logged 306,000 and Spain weighed in with 310,000.

Scandinavia, which has traditionally been a stronghold for the open-source browser, turned in relatively small numbers, with the three countries accounting for less than 180,000 downloads in total.

Other notable numbers include Iran, which logged 260,000 downloads, China, with 174,000 and Russia, which recorded 111,000 Firefox downloads.

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