Firefox 3 was released on Tuesday, June 17. Mozilla, publisher of Firefox, wanted to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a single day. But things did not go too well, at least at first.

The download Web site was, well, down or working intermittently on Tuesday, while worked to fix the problem. There is no current record for most downloads in one day. Mozilla is hoping for 5 million, but whatever the number turns out to be will be the new record.

But as the downloads proceeded, new problems surfaced. Firefox 3 was barely a few hours old before a critical vulnerability was found by security company TippingPoint. No details have been released, while works on a fix.

Users would have to visit a malicious Web site to be attacked. The flaw is said to affect Firefox 2.0 as well, so be careful where you click, until we get a patch.

In the end, Mozilla claimed the new browser was downloaded more than 8 million times in the first 24 hours. Download requests came from 200 countries. Guinness officials are verifying the numbers, and we will hear more about the results next week.

Firefox will now go head to head with Internet Explorer, the dominant browser. The beta version of IE 8 is out, and is scheduled for general release in August. As for the new Firefox browser, I have said before that you would be wise to wait a while before downloading it, to ensure that the initial bugs and problems have been worked out.

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

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