THE OUTFIT which markets the Firefox web browser, the Mozzarella Foundation, has heard from record keepers that it now holds the world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

Guinness officials have decided that the final 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0, which took place last month, was indeed a world record.

A big cheese in Mozzarella's marketing department, Paul Kim said that the enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was the key to making this happen.

Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records said getting that many downloads down the wire, and getting enough Firebadger fans to do it within the first 24 hours, was no small feat.

The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited.

According to the Beeb, the actual certificate will be presented by Guinness World Records in London next week.

At their busiest the servers were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute and it took only five hours for Version 3.0 downloads to exceed the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006.

Firebadger has 19 per cent of market share making it the second most popular browser after Microsoft's Internet Exploder. µ

L'Inq
Beeb