Ars Technica reports that Mozilla has released Firefox 4 beta for Android

Mozilla's efforts to scale down the Firefox browser and make it work on mobile devices took another step forward today with the release of Firefox 4 beta for Maemo and Android. On Android, the browser's performance is still not competitive with that of the platform's native WebKit-based browser, but the gap is starting to close.

Firefox's large disk footprint is also still problematic on Android, especially on devices like the Nexus One that have limited internal storage capacity. A fresh installation of Firefox on Android uses roughly 30MB of storage space. The first time it starts, it unpacks another 14MB, which takes about 15 seconds. Subsequent startups are faster, typically taking between 2 and 4 seconds.

  Mozilla releases Firefox 4 beta for Maemo and Android