I’ve chimed in on my opinion of Firefox 3 and the browser’s direction before, but the latest “news” on Firefox 3 has me rolling my eyes. Mozilla is trying to set a new Guinness world record for “most software downloads in 24 hours.” Is it just me or is this a lame attempt to look like a plucky underdog?

Get this though, they are launching this “Download Day” promotion and they don’t even know when Firefox 3 will be coming out, “but it should be in June.” Rule #1 for any sort of promotional day, figure out when it will be before you tell people about it. There also isn’t any existing record so they want to “outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day” which was only 1.6 million, but they throw out 5 million as a sky’s-the-limit goal.

Now I don’t have any of Microsoft’s server logs, but something tells me that with the Windows install base nearing one billion, they have probably had software with more that 5 million downloads in a day at Windows Update alone. It might even happen every month on patch Tuesday.

Mozilla should stick to focusing on the software and leave the gimmicks at home. But with it looking like Firefox’s only compelling improvement being that it doesn’t leak memory like a sieve (which is more of a bug fix right?), I guess they have to get what they can get.

You can follow their race for the record on various social networks, twitter, and even “pledge” on SpreadFirefox.com. How cute.