On July 18th, Firefox 3.0 was released. The Firefox people made an attempt to put Firefox 3 into the Guinness Book of World Record as the most downloaded software in a day. How did that attempt fare?
I guess they pretty much succeeded. I didn’t really keep up tabs with the record attempt. I did participate in the attempt, though. I even have a certificate to show for it. Did you participate? Have you downloaded your certificate of participation? Go get it if you haven’t.
8,000,000 downloads! Yes. That’s the number of downloads made on Firefox 3.0 Download Day. Can you believe that? 8 million downloads!
Earlier today, I received this email from the Firefox people.
We did it!
We set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. With your help we reached 8,002,530 downloads.
You are now part of a World Record and the proud owner of the best version of Firefox yet!
Don’t forget to download your very own certificate for helping set a Guinness World Record.
8 million downloads in a day. Quite an achievement, I might say. I wonder how they managed the bandwidth they received that day. Their servers must have been on overdrive or something. They were handling like more than 300,000 downloads per hour. That’s like 5,500 per minute. I think my server would have crashed under that extreme load.
Kudos to the entire Firefox team. They managed to handle the load. Surely there were some problems somewhere. Some people somewhere certainly faced some problems when they tried to download that day. My download was fine though.
Here’s what they have to say on their official site.
Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web.
Currently, as I am writing this, the total downloads have reached a staggering number – 29,056,240 downloads. In Malaysia alone, the number is around 163,000. In Singapore, almost 130,000 downloads. Indonesia recorded about 143,000 downloads. From these 3 countries, almost 500,000 downloads. Quite a number eh..