Mozilla Firefox has officially made history with Guinness world record book for the highest number of Firefox 3 download within 24 hours.

The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for web browser Firefox 3 took place in June. On Wednesday a day after it was released, the new copies of the software were being downloaded at a rate of 5,523 per minute.

The marketing head Paul Kim, say:

“The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen. The notion of going for a world record, as… nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea.

It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world”

Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it, “an extremely impressive accomplishment”. And Firefox 3.0 is going to be list in the update Guinness World Records as the first software that record highest number of download within a few days.

The official figure of download was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted.

Marketing manager Mary Colvig said, no party was planned to celebrate the record until the actual certificate was presented by Guinness World Records in London next week.

“Here at Mozilla headquarters (in Mountain View) I think most of us are just going to try and get to bed early now that we have the confirmation. We are all tired.”

Security flaw

On launch day some of the shine was taken away by security firms claiming to have found the first flaws in the new software.

Within five hours of Firefox 3 making its debut, DV Labs/Tipping Point reported a flaw that potentially let an attacker take over a PC if a user clicked on a booby-trapped link.

Mr Kim say, “Firefox users are safe. We have a patch in the works and hope to release it very soon.”

Another potentially disastrous glitch ahead of the world record attempt came when servers handling the downloads collapsed under the weight of visitors checking to see if the new version of the browser was available.

Once they were all up and running the clock started counting down.

At their busiest, the servers were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute. Within five hours the number of downloads for Version 3 exceeded the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2 in October 2006.