Firefox 3 has officially picked up a Guinness World Record for the most number of downloads in a single day.

A total of 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 around the world from 6pm on 17 June to 6pm on 18 June.

"Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours," said the organisation on its Firefox blog.

"Ever since Firefox was launched in 2004 we have relied on our community to help us spread the word.

"Thanks to projects including crop circles, newspaper ads, giant stickers, videos, blogs and more we now have over 180 million users in more than 230 countries."

Predictably the bulk of the downloads came from the US. Within Europe, Germany contributed most to the record attempt, nearly doubling the downloads of second placed Britain.

To date over 28 million users have downloaded and installed Firefox 3.