The release of the latest version of the popular web browser Firefox is due today, and its developer, Mozilla, hopes that it will set a world record in what software download is concerned.

It seems that at this moment there is no record for the number of downloads of a software product in 24 hours, but Mozilla plans to monitor it for Firefox 3 and then send the figures to Guinness World Records for a potential inclusion.

Mozilla hopes that there will be about 5 million people to download Firefox’s latest version, and is backing this up on the fact that every new release of the software is immediately and automatically announced to the users of the current version. When Firefox 2 was launched in October, 2006, it was downloaded by about 1.6 million people during the first 24 hours. Since then, the number of people who are using it as their default web browser has increased continuously.

Firefox was first launched in 2004 and since then it has managed to gain about 18 percent of the market share of web browsers, in some countries managing to gain as much as 30 percent. While Microsoft still holds about 75 percent of the market, the fast and continuous increase in the number of Firefox users has managed to make specialists wonder whether Microsoft will be able to hold on to its position for much longer.

According to the guys at Mozilla, Firefox 3 will be a much faster browser than all the released versions of its competitor, Internet Explorer. It seems that Firefox 3 is able to change the pages that show the Gmail e-mails in about 60 milliseconds, while the same thing takes IE 7 over 400 milliseconds to do.