The Mozilla team has announced that they are attempting to set a (Guinness Book) of World Record of number of downloads for a piece of software in 24 hours… A record never set before.

The first thought that came to me was… huh? How can this number not be set already – by Adobe (or back in the day Macromedia) Flash! Isn’t the Flash plugin downloaded millions of times per day? Flash is on more computers than any other software (including any operating system). Macromedia never and Adobe doesn’t really release any download statistics other than averages. I’m sure Flash 8 or 9 when they first went public shattered records. Adobe should release the results so Mozilla has a number to beat.

Just think back to the day YouTube decided to switch to Flash 9 and how many users downloaded then.

Mozilla may set the record, but by no means will they have broken one.

*Edit: Mozilla targets 5 million downloads within 24 hours, but I guess the didn’t know that Flash Player 9 is being installed at the rate of about 12 million a day.

I love FF3 (although I am shocked that they won’t fix a critical Flash bug that happens with RC1 for the final release). The search bar is great, and I don’t experience the slowdowns I did with FF2. But still, there seems to be a disconnect with FF and the web… Just look at this huge bugzilla thread about the Flash bug.