Yay… Firefox 3 Download Day

Firefox (a popular open source web browser) is hoping to rub shoulders with the likes of the worlds tallest man and the fastest banana eater by creating a Firefox 3 download day in the hope of earning their place in the Guinness book of world records for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

Mozilla Firefox has set up a ‘pledge’ system, whereby you enter your country and email pledging that you will download Firefox 3 on the download day (day yet to be announced). We jumped in becoming the 197,897th pledger (or at least around that figure), we then received this email shortly after:

“Thanks for pledging and joining our effort to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. Don’t forget to tell your friends, family and colleagues to pledge to download Firefox 3 during Download Day!”

At 00:23 GMT on Friday 30th we decided to do a little check to see how the pledges are going, for no good reason really and with no great accuracy. However by our calculations there are 934 pledges every 5 minutes, it probably isn’t the best time of the day to do this and it will probably increase in momentum very soon.

Over at the Firefox blog, Mary has been posting some tips, one of here tips is to:

“Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and we’ll provide the party favors.”

Please don’t… for the sake of your social status.

But on a serious note, this sort of media attention will only help the growth of Firefox enabling this excellent piece of software to improve release after release.