Mozilla easily cleared the bar in its attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours with the release of its Firefox 3.0. The Web browser’s update had an incredible success with more than eight million downloads in its first day of availability.

As soon as the download servers will finish adding to the statistics and an official number of downloads will be released, the performance will be registered by the Guiness World Record organisation.

The company’s officials explained that there were some problems encountered with the servers, as the massive amount of visitors and downloads let to their temporary collapse. As soon as the problem was fixed, everything else turned out according to plan. At their busiest moment, the servers handled about 9,000 downloads per minute.

It only took five hours for the 3.0 version to reach the company’s previous record for number of downloads set in October 2006 at 1.6 million. As the hours went by, a huge number of users rushed to get their hands on the new release and by the time of the 24th hour, the count presented a number a bit over 8.3 million downloads.

The new Firefox 3 offers its users a significant browsing speed boost and adds several other improvements, such as improved reliability, lower memory usage, better platforms for developers through new graphics and font handling, easier to use features and also a highly improved security system.

Four years ago, Firefox was relatively small on the market with Microsoft holding all the cards. At the time, it’s features and improvements were not completely understood by Internet users, but as time flew by it managed to make a name for itself, grabbing over the years a fifth of the global market.