The next big release by Mozilla is upon us, Firefox 3.5 has been officially released for Windows, Linux and Mac and is one of the most anticipated browser releases of this year.

Following the release of Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 2 and Safari 4, the second most used browser in the world gets updated to 3.5. It may only be a zero-point-five addition, but this doesn't mean it's without any noteworthy feature, in fact, it's the opposite.

Performance
One of the major changes in this release is the inclusion of TraceMonkey, which makes JavaScript much faster in Firefox, following Chrome's V8 and Safari's Nitro engines. Although initial benchmarks have shown that it's not faster than either of the competitors, it does give them a solid third place, well beyond Internet Explorer and Opera. Other performance work has landed in for the rendering engine, which now uses speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

Standards
A lot of work has been put in doing HTML5 work, a standard which is still a work in progress. Similar to Opera, Firefox uses Theora for audio and video playback when the new <video> or <audio> elements are used. This means you won't need any plug-in installed in addition to your web browser to view movies, or listen music when browsing compatible web sites. Other new technologies include geo-location support, native JSON (a common way of representing data for JS), and web worker threads.

Further support has been added for: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles (the first after Safari!), and SVG transforms.

Privacy
And last, but not least is Private Browsing Mode, which offers similar functionality to Safari, Chrome and IE: visiting web sites without leaving any traces. No cookies, no history, no cache is left, which makes it all the easier to browse pr0n or finding a birthday present on a shared PC or Mac.

Summary
Mozilla Firefox 3.5 offers a compelling upgrade towards all existing Firefox users by bringing in a lot of features that the competition already had picked up. Although you might say that they've been playing a (partial) catch-up game, it still offers enough (technical and tweaked) enhancements to separate itself from the competition and remain the fierce competitor it has always been.

You can download Firefox 3.5, in 70 languages for several platforms from the official Mozilla web site.