Melbourne, June 19 : Fans of the Mozilla Firefox web browser claim that they have set a world record by downloading the latest version of the software program more than eight million times in 24 hours.

Firefox 3, the latest version of the software, was launched at 3am (AEST) on Wednesday morning.

Its developers and fans organised a campaign they called ‘Download Day’ with a view to setting a Guinness World Record for the highest number of downloads of a program in 24 hours.

A message on the Download Day website says that the figures have been set on Guinness for review, and that the results will be out in a few days.

According to News. com. au, a map of downloads by region on the Web site suggests that Firefox 3 has been downloaded almost 150,000 times in Australia so far.

The most downloads of Firefox 3 came from the US (2.9 million), followed by Germany (806,000) and Japan (440,000).

Canada, Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Lithuania, and Poland were among other countries that rush to download the browser.

So far, there has been no official world record for the most downloads of a particular program in 24 hours, and thus the Download Day attempt did not have any specific target to beat.

The Download Day attempt was organised by "community marketing" group Spread Firefox!, a volunteer-driven online organisation affiliated with the Mozilla Foundation.

Firefox is the second most popular browser in the world after Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and one of the most well-known examples of the open source code ideology, a principle that encourages community participation in software development. (ANI)