The Mozilla Foundation has set a world record and achieved new heights in its battle for browser market share. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 Web browser set a record for the most downloads in a day. It was the first time a browser-maker attempted to set a record.

Mozilla set the record with 8,002,530 downloads in June. The Mozilla Foundation will receive the official certificate in London next week.

"Setting a world record really doesn't matter. It's a marketing stunt," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch. "At the end of the day you still have to look at who has the overwhelming browser market share. It still belongs to Microsoft."

Breaking Down Browser Shares

Indeed, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser. But Firefox is gaining ground, according to a new report from Net Applications. The release of Firefox 3.0 on June 17 spurred rapid usage gains, topping four percent worldwide. In the first hour after the product was released, Firefox 3.0 gained one percent of worldwide market share.

Firefox 3 gains came mostly from users upgrading from Firefox 2, while its overall usage share grew about .4 percent, primarily at the expense of Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications.

IE's market share dipped from 73.75 percent in May to 73.01 percent at the end of June, Net Applications' latest data shows. Firefox increased its overall share during the same period from 18.41 percent to 19.03 percent.

Is Firefox Really the Safest Browser?

In a flurry of good news reports for Firefox, Mozilla users are most likely to be using the latest versions of their browsers, with 83 percent of Firefox users patched, according to joint research from , IBM and Communications Systems Group in Switzerland.

By contrast, only 63.3 percent of Safari users and 56.1 percent of Opera users have the latest versions. Microsoft Internet Explorer users ranked at the bottom with only 47.6 percent using the most secure version of IE7.

The researchers said the auto-update mechanism within Firefox is the most efficient patching mechanism of the Web browsers it studied. But Gartenberg said there is a dark side to automatic updates.

"One one hand, yes it does mean you can push out the updates and make everyone implicitly more secure as a result. On the other hand, as we saw with the Sony issue, you could push out an update that does harm. What if Mozilla pushes out an update that has bugs in it or security flaws in it? That would actually make the browser less secure," Gartenberg said.

He likened auto updates to prescription drugs. Medications work fine if the patient is only taking one prescription, but when they are taking multiple medicines they may experience strange and sometimes dangerous side effects.

"Automatic updates are fine if that's the only program that's installed, but what happens if you have multiple software programs installed with all kinds of updating behind the scenes and those updates don't play together nicely," Gartenberg said. "There's a downside to automatic updates."