The hype machine is certainly in full gear at Mozilla with the launch of its next generation Firefox 3 browser just a few weeks away. The latest 'stunt' that Mozilla is building to generate hype and interest is nothing short of breaking a world record.

Literally.

That's right, the Mozilla people want to set an official Guinness Book of World Records record with the all time download record for software on a single day.

Mozilla has set up a portal page on its SpreadFireFox community marketing site to help drive the effort and track pledged downloads. As of this blog posting they've got 189 pledged downloads for whenever Firefox 3 comes out. Considering that there are over 170 million users of Firefox, I'd expect the number of pledged downloads to grow.

Whether or not it will be a World Record or not is another question - which leads to the bigger question of:

What is current world record for software downloads on a single day anyways?

The Guinness site does not list a result - for good reason. There isn't such a record.

According to Mozilla's FAQ on the World Record:

This is the first record attempt of its kind so there is no set number. We'd really like to outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million. Let's shoot for 5 million--the sky is the limit!

Neat idea. Set a world record for a record that has never been recorded.

Though Mozilla had a bunch of launch events around the release of Firefox 2 - it was the big New York Times Ad push for Firefox 1 that I remember as the biggest Firefox launch. With a seemingly guaranteed world record, Firefox 3 is likely to top that event as being the most memorable.