It has been claimed that 8.3 million copies of Mozilla Firefox 3 were downloaded on the day of its launch.

The official number has still to be confirmed by Guinness, but it is believed that a new downloading world record will have been set, according to an ITPro report.

Mozilla has stated that it expects the official number to be "a little lower as we weed out over-counts over the next few weeks".

Yesterday it was reported that due to the volume of demand, the company's servers were inactive for two hours.

Mozilla claims that at peak levels it experienced 17,000 downloads every minute.

In the UK it is estimated that 300,000 people downloaded the program, with the US accounting for 2.6 million downloads on in the first day.

Users in Germany and Japan are reported to have made 700,000 and 406,000 downloads respectively.

The company estimates that there are 150 million users of its web browser, which aims to promote "openness" and "opportunity" on the internet.