After months of hard work the combined forces of the open-source community under the Mozilla banner have released the next version of Firefox. While the version number may not imply it, the amount of changes is significant under the hood.

Finally it's here, the final release of Firefox 3.6, which helps the furry web browser to position itself better against the fierce competition, of which the ever evolving Chrome might be the biggest on the radar.

For performance the JavaScript engine has been increased, but also updated to work asynchronously when loading the page, decreasing the start-up time. On the other hand a lot of effort was put into making the UI of the web browser, which runs on XUL in the rendering engine, more responsive while loading content.

Standards support for CSS, DOM and HTML 5 has also expended including most noticeably support for the WOFF font format.

Other changes include tighter security for add-ons (preventing crashes), alerts for out-of-date plugins, full screen video-tag support, integrated light weight themes (known as Personas), and much more.

As noted before Firefox 3.6 may very well mark a new milestone. With Firefox 3.7 possibly removed from the road map as a traditional release milestone, the coming months may be filled with small updates that include (under the hood) improvements until we reach the release of Firefox 4.0 with a new look and feel.

Firefox users are recommended to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 and can do so by downloading the full installer from the official Mozilla web site.