It’s now official. Firefox 3 has been officially entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most downloaded software in a 24-hour period. Last month on the first day of its release Firefox 3 was downloaded over 8 million times; 8,002,530 to be exact.

Of course, Firefox3 didn’t exactly have any competition since this was a new world record category that they just made up, but we can’t deny that over 8 million downloads in a day is an impressive feat in any case.

“The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world.”, said Mozilla Marketing head Paul Kim.

Firefox was started in November of 2004 and has become increasingly popular over the past few years. Even with this last boost the browser remains #2 in popularity behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with close to a 20% market share.

Interestingly, Firefox enjoys 48% of the market share of visitors here to the ‘Brick, followed by Internet Explorer at 41%.

Mozilla