Mozilla officially releases Firefox 3.6

Early birds might have caught my earlier post telling you how to get access to the Firefox 3.6 download ahead of the official launch. Well, now Mozilla have officially released the new version of the popular browser.

• Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
• Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins
• Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
• Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
• Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
• Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames

There's also a lot of cool stuff for developers:

• Support for the latest HTML5 specification, including the File API for local file handling
• Font Support: In addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, 3.6 now supports the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF)
• CSS gradients: Supports linear and radial CSS gradients which allow for a smoother transition between colors
• Device orientation: Firefox 3.6 exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages

Here are the full release notes for the latest release.

Mozilla claim that Firefox 3.6 is some 20% faster than Firefox 3.5, and my initial testing seems to agree, although it's still not faster than Google Chrome. That said, in terms of speed, the browser is light-years ahead of Internet Explorer.