We think it's safe to say that Mozilla has achieved it's goal and set a new world record, with the download counter sitting at 6.5 million and still rising fast as of 9:00AM Eastern. In fact, the frenzy was so furious that it actually took down Mozilla's servers yesterday!

According to data from Net Applications, the use of Firefox 3 has skyrocketed over the past 24 hours, up to 4.25% of the market — 1 out of every 25 browsers is now FF3. Who knows where the counter will be — 8 million, 10 million? — when 1:00 finally rolls around, but we're guessing that when it does, there will be a Guinness record attached.

Update: According to the Mozilla Blog, the official tally was 8,295,045. It's now up to the Guinness judges to certify the official total.