"Mobilizing over 8 million internet users within 24 hours is an extremely impressive accomplishment and we would like to congratulate the Mozilla community for their hard work and dedication," said Gareth Davies, records manager for Guinness World Records.
In order to validate the record, the Guinness World Records association took a copy of Mozilla's server logs, conducted a thorough audit, weeded out duplicate and incomplete downloads and arrived at the exact figure of 8,002,530 downloads from the period of 8:16 UTC on June 17 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18 2008.
This staggering feat would not have been possible without the grass-roots involvement of Mozilla and open-source activists worldwide - who, via a huge campaign carried out on their own time, managed to co-ordinate launch parties and other events in order to make it such a huge success.
The geographic spread of these downloads may be seen by some as surprising - to date, although 50 different language versions of the browser have been released, some areas have shocked the user base with the amount of downloads. The USA, unsurprisingly, managed to come in first with a huge proportion of downloads - an impressive 7,734,930 to date. But other English speaking nations were pipped to the post by Japan in second place, with 1,324,608 downloads to date, and the UK trailing slightly behind with 1,198,993 downloads to date.
As both Firefox 1.5 and 2 steal ever yet more market share from Internet Explorer, the stratospheric rise of the Mozilla browser looks set to continue for the foreseeable future.
