Literally.
That’s right, the Mozilla people want to set an official Guinness Book of World Records record with the all time download record for software on a single day.
Mozilla has set up a portal page on its SpreadFireFox community marketing site to help drive the effort and track pledged downloads. As of this blog posting they’ve got 189 pledged downloads for whenever Firefox 3 comes out. Considering that there are over 170 million users of Firefox, I’d expect the number of pledged downloads to grow.
Whether or not it will be a World Record or not is another question – which leads to the bigger question of:
What is current world record for software downloads on a single day anyways?
The Guinness site does not list a result – for good reason. There isn’t such a record.
According to Mozilla’s FAQ on the World Record:
This is the first record attempt of its kind so there is no set
number. We’d really like to outdo the number of Firefox 2
downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million. Let’s shoot for 5
million–the sky is the limit!
Neat idea. Set a world record for a record that has never been recorded.
Though Mozilla had a bunch of launch events around the release of Firefox 2 – it was the big New York Times Ad push for Firefox 1 that I remember as the biggest Firefox launch. With a seemingly guaranteed world record, Firefox 3 is likely to top that event as being the most memorable.
