With Mozilla increasing the pace of new Firefox releases (3.5 took far too long, and Chrome is racing release out of the door), the first beta of the successor of one of the most popular browsers is here.

As the first number indicates this is a minor upgrade of the current stable release, but nonetheless sports some interesting improvements.

First apparent addition is that of Personas, allowing you to change Firefox with lightweight themes, which do not require a restart of the browser. Personas has been out for a while now as a separate add-on for Firefox 3.x. Unlike normal themes, Personas consist mostly of a new background (image, style) and menus. For different buttons, or more complete changes you're still stuck.

Other changes include a plug-in checker, first seen in the latest Firefox 3.5 builds, full screen support for the native video tag, support for the WOFF font format, support for new web technologies and best of all increased JS performance, start-up time and responsiveness.

Be sure to read the complete release notes before downloading this beta release.