Mozilla’s successful attempt to set a world record for downloads of a single program, Firefox 3 was dumb. It was also incredibly successful.

Does anyone really care about how many copies of a program are downloaded in a day? In 2008? When a program can be downloaded from hundreds of different sites? When BitTorrent and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks makes measuring file ‘downloads’ more of an exercise in speculative fiction than a science?

I guess so because, not even counting the fuzzy downloads of P2P networks and the like, Firefox was downloaded 8.3-million times in one day. This is spiffy. Meaningless in and of itself, but spiffy.

Having said that, I will say Mozilla’s pounding the drum for downloading Firefox did do one good thing. It did a great job of marketing Firefox.

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