Mozilla Foundation clocked 5 million downloads of its new browser in the first 24 hours after it released. A lot of bugs have been spotted and will be rectified in an upcoming patch.

Mozilla’s security patch is expected to release in three weeks and will kill at least three bugs and ‘topcrashes’ that even haunt uses of the latest version of Internet Explorer.

“(The) goal of this release should be a quick turnaround that fixes topcrashes and bugs we almost held ship for,” said Mozilla earlier this week in its status meeting notes.

One of the fixes includes a patch for TraceMonkey, the outfit’s speedy yet buggy JavaScript engine.

It is ironic that the reason for Mozilla’s delay of the new browser by six months was because they had problems with the Javascript engine which they still haven’t sorted out.

The opensource Mozilla clocked more downloads with their older version of their browser in 24 hours following its release.

In June 2008 Mozilla pulled in over seven million downloads in the first 24 hours of Firefox 3.0 being available.

However, servers initially buckled under the pressure of all the traffic driven to Mozilla’s site after it urged people to help it break the Gunniess World record for the highest number of downloads in one day. It succeeded, despite the PR fiasco that ensued.