Mozilla has announced that they have set a new world record with over 8 million downloads of the Firefox 3 browser from Tuesday to Wednesday of this week, and they are just waiting for the Guinness folks to come around and verify the numbers. While we do like Firefox here at the ‘Brick and use it as our default browser, we did have a few questions about this record attempt in general.

For starters, there was really no Guinness record for the most number of downloads to begin with, so beating a record that was not there was a shoe-in for the company. Also, if someone wants to shoot it down it just might not be all that hard since Adobe says that 8 million Flash Player installs is just an average day. YouTube servers out over 100 million videos each day and what is the torrent download count at, like over 5 billion?

Also you have to wonder just how many of these installs were really new users and how much the marketing hype helps to increase the number of Firefox users. Most downloads were likely from people upgrading from Firefox 2, and the number of people switching from something like IE to Firefox on the launch day is unlikely much more than usual. Even more unlikely is that a lot of people would make Firefox their default browser instead of something else just due to the Firefox 3 launch.

Mozilla saw 1.6 million downloads the first day for Firefox 2 and they picked the number 5 million out of the sky as a goal for the Firefox 3 browser, which they exceeded by over 3 million. Our skeptic nature also makes us think that a lot of downloads were done just to help boost the numbers for the day.

But, nevertheless 8 million in one day is a lot of downloads and Firefox is an excellent browser. Mozilla stands by the idea that they are not necessarily trying to reach a certain number, but according to Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker, they are more interested in “having fun and building a better Internet”.