Armed with market research that showed Americans spend as much time researching a vacation as they do a mortgage loan (answer: five hours), Zillow.com is launching a mortgage marketplace that allows consumers to anonymously receive custom loan quotes and rate their lenders.

Zillow.com, which created a buzz in the real estate industry two years ago with its online home value “zestimates”, hopes to add transparency and information to the mortgage application process, while making it easier and faster to get mortgage quotes.

On its Web site, potential borrowers can fill out a detailed loan request form, which doesn’t ask for any identifiable information. Registered lenders can respond with quotes and rates, which are displayed on Zillow’s standardized quote form aimed at making comparisons easier. The borrower then has the option to contact lenders about their quotes.

Adobe Systems has shared the first scrap of information about its next version of Photoshop, CS4, and it’s a doozy: there will be a 64-bit version of the photo-editing software, but only for Windows and not Mac OS X.

Adobe generally keeps features in the Windows and Mac versions at a level of parity, but that wasn’t possible this time around because of a change Apple made last year to the Mac’s programming underpinnings, said John Nack, Adobe’s product manager for Photoshop, in an interview.

“We’re not going to ship 64-bit native for Mac with CS4,” Nack said. “We respect Apple’s need to balance their resources and make decisions right for that platform. But it does have an impact on developers.”

Does Google want to buy travel site Expedia? A Wall Street analyst referred to rumors Tuesday morning that Google could make a bid and that drove up the stock of Expedia about 9 percent at one point, according to Reuters.

The rumors are just that though, at this point.

Mozilla released its fifth beta version of Firefox 3 for Windows and the Mac on Wednesday, bringing a handful of improvements in ease of use to the open-source Web browser. A portable version is also available.

Overall, Firefox 3 beta 5 includes 750 changes from the previous beta, focusing on enhanced stability, Web site compatibility, and platform and user-interface improvements.

In the ease-of-use arena, Beta 5 is designed to offer improvements in integration with Windows, Mac, and Linux. The beta aims to show improvements to Windows icons, as well as native user interface widgets in Web forms and the browser.

Comcast Corp. the largest U.S. cable television operator, said on Wednesday it has started offering a super-fast Internet service that allows customers to download a high-definition movie in 10 minutes.

The new premium service was launched in the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and marks a leap in connection speeds for Comcast. The new service offers speeds starting at 50 megabits per second, compared with the previous fastest connection speeds of 16 mb per second.

Comcast said the new service is aimed at residential and business customers. But at $149.95 a month, compared with about $50 a month for its usual service, it is likely to attract businesses or very heavy residential users, such as video game players or movie download fans.

The company plans to increase speeds on the service, eventually offering speeds of 100 mb to 160 mb per second.

Facing prickly questions about possible conflicts of interest, Google Inc. will sell a recently acquired service called Performics that helps Web sites improve their ranking on online search engines, including Google’s.

The decision, announced Wednesday, comes three weeks after Google picked up Performics as part of the online search leader’s $3.2 billion purchase of online ad service DoubleClick.

In other fallout from the DoubleClick deal, Google reportedly is preparing to eliminate about 300 jobs in the biggest purge in the Mountain View-based company’s 9 1/2-year history. The New York Times reported Google’s layoff plans on its Web site late Wednesday, citing an unnamed person with direct knowledge of the upcoming cuts

Paramount Pictures’ film vault is opening up in the virtual world.

Thousands of video clips from Paramount’s movie library - ranging from “Footloose” to “Clueless” - will be available inside the virtual 3-D online worlds of There.com and vMTV, Paramount Digital Entertainment and Makena Technologies Inc. announced Wednesday.

“Consumers today are not interested in a passive experience online,” Paramount senior vice president of entertainment Derek Broes told The Associated Press. “Even when they are just watching a piece of entertainment, they’re commenting on it or looking at it with a friend. They’re very actively involved.”

There.com and vMTV members will be able to express themselves with seconds-long video clips of movie one liners - say, Danny Zucko’s “Be cool, huh?” from “Grease” - with the service called VooZoo. The application from Los Angeles-based developer FanRocket was introduced on social-networking site Facebook last month and on mobile devices Tuesday.

The PG-13-or-tamer snippets will cost There.com and vMTV members about $1 and will play in a small window above avatars’ heads inside the online realms. In addition to archive footage, Paramount hopes to use the application to virally market upcoming releases, such as “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”