“Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we got more than 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours. That’s more Firefox downloads than we’ve ever had in a single day — an impressive feat indeed!,” reads the Mozilla announcement. “Please be patient while the good people of Guinness review our World Record attempt. This might take a few days so please check back here. And, a huge thanks for all of your support!”

Servers have been down and downloads were sluggish, but here are the first official figures. The top Firefox 3 downloader in the US, followed at great lenghts by Germany, Japan, the UK and France:
– United States – 2,580,000
– Germany – 663,000
– Japan – 403,000
– UK – 295,000
– France – 290,000

“We’re really proud of Firefox 3 and it just shows what a committed, energized global community can do when they work together,” said John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla.

Firefox 3 is now available in approximately 50 languages. According to Mozilla, the new broswer is two to three times faster than its predecessor and offers more than 15,000 improvements.

Firefox 3 can be downloaded from here.

Interesting enough, it seems that only two countries remained untouched until now by the Firefox 3 phenomenon: North Korea and Western Sahara.