In New York on Wednesday the software developers of Firefox 3 said that in its first 24 hours, FF3 was downloaded over 8 million times. At the peak of it being downloaded, the Firefox website was serving over 17,000 copies a minute. Some of the downloads came from over 200 countries, led mostly by the U.S., Britain, Spain, Japan, and Germany.

Supporters of Firefox were hoping to get into the Guinness Book of world records for this. This is a new category and has never been tried before so Guinness have to certify it first; but that could take a couple of weeks.

The software download (which is free) is still available, but any subsequent downloads now will not be counted towards the potential Guinness Record. The Tuesday release of the upgraded browser was put off for more than an hour because visitors were looking for the update and ended-up overloading Firefox’s web servers. As a result, the site became slow and unreachable to many who tried to get onto it for about two hours, this began at approximately 12:45PM EST. This information came from an Internet performance monitoring company called AlertSite.

For any of you that are familiar with Firefox, this comes from Mozilla, which is a community where thousands of people, mostly volunteers, get together and come up with new, free ideas. It’s ranked the number two web browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Now, Firefox 3 will include more enhancements to aid internet users in organizing their web pages or sites that they visit a lot and they block access to sites that are known to send out viruses and other malicious spyware or software.

Now, users of Yahoo’s mail service can use this browser to send email by clicking on the “mailto” link that they might see while clicking on a name or a “contact us” link on any web page. This is something that could not be done before. Back then, these links would open a standalone desktop e-mail program, like Outlook Express. Now to top it all off, Firefox 3 also has major speed and awesome design.

Source: MSNBC