According to the Mozilla foundation that released the new browser, the software was downloaded 8.3 million times in its first 24 hours of release starting Tuesday morning.

The downloads were so popular that they initially crashed the servers running the operation. At their busiest, the servers were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute and within five hours had surpassed the initial daily download of 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006. But the success was tempered by reports from a software security company that Firefox 3.0 contained a serious security flaw! Within five hours after the official release, security tool vendor TippingPoint noted a “critical vulnerability” affecting Firefox 3.0 and 2.0 and reported it to Mozilla. (remark by publisher: I’m not aware of security flaws being reported before on FF 2.0 - so they found that in just 2.0 just now???)

Mozilla on its security blog stated that, “There is no public exploit, the details are private, and so the current risk to users is minimal. We are investigating the issue. At Mozilla we appreciate any report of security issues because that is how we make the browser stronger and more secure. The best way to keep Firefox users safe is to report the issues directly to Mozilla as TippingPoint has chosen to, and to wait to release details until a fix is available.

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