Mozilla has announced they have released Firefox 4 for Android. It’s also available to download for Maemo devices. Mozilla says that Firefox 4 is up to three times faster than the stock browser in Android, so that is definitely good news.

There are also major enhancements to the JavaScript engine, which is designed to make sites load faster. The mobile version is built using the same technology as the desktop version, and offers tabs, one touch bookmarking, and a whole bunch of browser controls. Sounds awesome. We can’t wait to try it.

HP has its sights set on offering up some new computers to desktop PC business users. This line is called the HP Compaq dc7900 and you’ll find starting prices set around $600.

HP’s new Compaq dc7900 line will be available in ultra-slim desktop, small form factor or convertible minitower models. The company hasn’t yet unveiled a lot of technical details, but we do know these models will be Energy Star 4.0 qualified as well as running something new called the HP Firefox Virtual Browser. This is a real-time Web surfing environment which “corrals malicious content from a user’s Internet interactions and removes unwanted programs with a single click.” The dc7900 is apparently the first HP PC to have this offering.

It’s now official. Firefox 3 has been officially entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most downloaded software in a 24-hour period. Last month on the first day of its release Firefox 3 was downloaded over 8 million times; 8,002,530 to be exact.

Of course, Firefox3 didn’t exactly have any competition since this was a new world record category that they just made up, but we can’t deny that over 8 million downloads in a day is an impressive feat in any case.

“The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world.”, said Mozilla Marketing head Paul Kim.

Firefox …

Mozilla has announced that they have set a new world record with over 8 million downloads of the Firefox 3 browser from Tuesday to Wednesday of this week, and they are just waiting for the Guinness folks to come around and verify the numbers. While we do like Firefox here at the ‘Brick and use it as our default browser, we did have a few questions about this record attempt in general.

For starters, there was really no Guinness record for the most number of downloads to begin with, so beating a record that was not there was a shoe-in for the company. Also, if someone wants to shoot it down it just might not be all that hard since Adobe says that 8 million Flash Player installs is just an average day. YouTube servers out over 100 million videos each day and what is the torrent download count at, like over 5 billion?

Mozilla has decided to get down to business about developing a mobile browser and have recently hired two developers experienced in mobile Linux-based applications to start building a mobile version of the Firefox browser. The company didn’t give any dates on when they thought the new browser would be available and it might be a little early to know what types of phones it would be able to run on, but they did let us know it wouldn’t be this year.

We would love to see something in the way of mobile from Firefox soon and hopefully sometime next year. The longer Mozilla takes the stiffer the competition will become and already the company will have challenges getting into mobile devices with Microsoft and Apple. Both of these companies run their own browser on their respective platforms which integrate nicely, but that certainly hasn’t stopped Firefox from swaying a chunk of users already with desktop browsers. Here at the ‘Brick we currently see over 38% of our readers using a Firefox browser and that percentage continues to rise. Opera Software will be another tough competitor having had a mobile browser in the market for a number of years already, but Mozilla feels there is till room for another and possibly better option.

According to the Spread Firefox blog over 400 million downloads of the Firefox web browser have occurred since it’s launch just 3 years ago in November of 2004. The post spelled out a little history of the spread of Firefox, citing 25 million downloads in the first 99 days of the browser being available. Within a year they had over 100 million and another 100 million the year after that.

This 400 million downloads doesn’t necessarily mean that there are 400 million installations of the browser running out there, but it is nevertheless impressive considering Microsoft pretty much had a monopoly on the browser market just a few years ago with Internet Explorer. In fact the last 30 days here on the ‘Brick show that 42% of our readers are using Firefox which is up from 35% about a year …

Not long after the release of the new MS IE, this week Mozilla released Firefox 2.0, which is the next major version of its Web browser with increased security enhancements and a number of new features having the intentions of making Web browsing a little bit more fun and a lot more intuitive. If you have been a frequent user of Firefox, the changes on the surface may not be too astonoshing, but there are some that are worth mentioning.

One of the key features included in the Firefox 2.0 web browser is Tabbed browsing, which is a component that Mozilla originally created and is now available on IE7 which allows a user to quickly switch between multiple differnt Web sites within the same program window intead of having multiple instances of the browser open. The red ‘X’ to close each web site …