Firefox 3 achieved an amazing eight million downloads in a day when it launched. Did Firefox 4 beat that? Well, not really, but it passed the five million number within the first 24 hours. Not bad at all, but not outdoing it’s predecessor.

Even though it didn’t break the record, according to StatCounter, the latest Firefox already has a 1.95 percent share of the browser market, which is double what IE9 has so far. Go Firefox. It’s proof that you don’t have to break records to make some headway.

Great news for Firefox users. Mozilla has now launched the official version of its FireFox 4 browser and it is available to download now from the Mozilla website. It has already hit 400,000 downloads and continues to climb.

We wonder if it will beat Microsofts IE9′s 2.3 million downloads on its first day. What do you think? We say yes. Some of the new features included in the official Firefox 4 browser include Panorama to organize your sites into groups and App Tabs which allows you to keep your favorite tabs within easy access. sounds like some nice improvements.

If you don’t like the browsing experience on your Android-powered device, then here is some good news. Opera is planning to bring its Opera Mobile browser to Android within a month. That’s right, Opera on your Android device.

The two main features of Opera Mobile are pinch-to-zoom and hardware acceleration, which promises faster navigation and improvements to the user interface. When it arrives, you can install it by searching the Android Market.

Internet Explorer’s global browser market share has declined year after year, moving away from its 90% figure back in 2003. Microsoft hopes to gain some ground with its Internet Explorer 9 beta announcement. Maybe they can reclaim some numbers from Google Chrome and Firefox.

Faster than IE8, IE9 will also be more compliant with HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 standards. Microsoft is pinning all of their hopes on IE9 being the only browser to take advantage of full hardware acceleration when you surf the Internet. However, Mozilla disputes that claim, saying that they are faster and first. Hopefully this isn’t a case of too little too late for the big M.

By now, you’ve probably heard of the Skyfire browser. Well, now the company has announced that its flash-enabled browser has hit the 1 million mark.

It’s a great browser to use if your mobile device hasn’t received official support for Adobe Flash yet. Skyfire is compatible with a wide range of phones including the HTC EVO 4G, Droid Incredible, Droid X, Droid 2, and Samsung Galaxy S.

This could be the interface of the upcoming Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).It could be since Microsoft is having a beta launch event in San Francisco on September 15. So it could be the real deal. The screen shot seen shows a navigation bar with less controls, though you will still have a back button and a URL/ search box at the top.

Whatever is going on, IE9 is on its way, and the final release could get some users back in Microsoft’s camp, which is great news for them since they have lost so many.

There’s no mobile version of Firefox for the iPhone yet, but the Firefox Home app lets you sync your desktop browsing session to your iPhone and browse it via Safari while you’re on the go. It’s not a real browser like Firefox, but we weren’t even sure that Apple would give the go ahead to Firefox Home.

Luckily they did. The app is available in the App Store, and there are instructions on Mozilla’s blog to get you started. Anyone interested in this one?

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, what with all of the browsers available. For the first time ever Microsoft’s Internet Explorer accounts for less than 60% of the browser market. At one point it dominated with 95% of the market in 2003. NetApplications, who published the figure, has IE at 59.9%, Firefox with 24.5% and Google’s Chrome with a 6.7% share (up from 1.7% last year). Safari wasn’t listed.

Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann, said, “There are more viable alternatives now. Google has been advertising and there are more people using Macs and Apple’s Safari. There is just a great awareness that there are alternatives,” And it might just be that MS is losing loyal users as well.

If you love Microsoft’s browser, here’s some good news. The next version of Internet Explorer adds a bunch of features. Internet Explorer 9 will add support for HTML5, which is one of the new standards on the net, and allow the browser to run more complicated video and graphics.

IE9 is also getting hardware acceleration, allowing more resources to work with for a speedier browser. There’s also a new JavaScript engine which will make sitesl more responsive.

The browser wars are heating up. Just in the last quarter, Chrome, Safari and Opera have all set new records for browser market share with 4.63, 4.46 and 2.4 percent. The period is also significant because it is the first time Chrome has beaten Safari to third place, and all of the numbers come at the expense of IE, which is losing users at a rate of 0.92 percentage points a month.

Sure, Microsoft’s 62.7 percent slice still looks nice, but projections from Net Applications suggest that it could shrink to below 50 percent by May of 2010. Net Applications monitors incoming traffic to over 40,000 websites to generate a sample size of about 160 million unique visitors per month, so if they say that it’s so, it likely is.

Supposedly Microsoft is working on a Google Chrome OS counter. This could be the Gazelle browser, which wants to treat the browser itself more like an OS. The Gazelle prototype supposedly will to do things like protect webapps from each other, and isolate different browser tabs (like Google Chrome does and Firefox is going to do).

It’s just one of many research projects Microsoft is working on, but it would make sense for them to unveil this one next week, to show that they’re not taking a backseat to Google. It won’t replace IE, at least not for awhile.

Firefox 3.5 includes the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which is said to be more than twice as fast as in v3.0 and ten times faster than Firefox 2, together with native integration of Ogg Theora video, and Location Aware Browsing.

There’s also some new privacy controls, including a “private browsing” mode that keeps no history, as well as a “Forget this Site” feature that clears all the temporary files, passwords, stored logins from a particular domain. The browser market has been heating up lately, with Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 8, Google’s Chrome getting several updates and Apple debuting a new version of Safari at WWDC 2009 etc.

Anytime I am looking to buy some new hardware for my computer it seems like I spend hours comparing prices to find the best deal. Sometimes I get sick of looking and just buy without doing all the comparisons I know I could do and then I end up thinking in the back of my head I could have got it cheaper.

I ran across a new add-on for Firefox called Dynamite Data that is cool and will help find the lowest prices for any product you are shopping for. Once the add-on is installed all you need to do is go to a product page on any website and the add-on will show you how much the product costs from other websites.

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8, its latest version in the browser battle. This latest version comes loaded with a set of new features designed to make browsing the internet more convenient, fast and secure. The latest IE browser is also the latest blow to rival Mozilla’s Firefox in the quest for online browsing dominance.

Microsoft added a number of security features to IE8, such as increased protection against malware, cross-site scripting attacks, click-jacking, and protection against installing malicious Active-X controls. In addition, they’ve added an InPrivate browsing mode which will track no history of your browsing activities, negating the need to delete the history after the fact.

Opera on Tuesday has announced the final release of the latest and greatest version of its mobile browser, Opera Mini 4.2. We saw the 4.2 version go into beta release only earlier this month sporting some new features including skins, additional servers and faster performance, video and Notes sync.

The final v4.2 release that we downloaded today appears to be very similar, if not exactly the same, as the beta version we got a couple of weeks ago. Opera boasts increased speed of as much as 30 percent, support for multiple languages, the ability to skin the browser to match your preference and of course the ability to play mobile-targeted YouTube videos (provided you have a newer Sony Ericsson or Nokia phone, for now). Users can also sync up notes between the mobile browser and the Opera desktop browser with Opera Link.