Firefox 3.5 now available

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3.5 is now available and describes the release as a "major update." According to the browser maker, Firefox 3.5 boosts performance, introduces useful new features and delivers strong support for emerging Web standards.

"So much is happening on the Web right now, it's a great time for browsers. Firefox 3.5 brings together the most innovative Web technologies and delivers them in the most complete and powerful modern browser," said Mozilla CEO John Lilly in a statement.

Firefox's new features include:

• Private Browsing pr0n mode
  
• The ability to go back in time and clear recent history
  
• Support for HTML5 video and audio tags, including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio
  
• A new JavaScript engine, known as TraceMonkey, which improves performance twofold over Firefox 3.0 and tenfold over Firefox 2.0
  
• Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation
  
• Tear off tabs

Both private browsing and tear off tabs have existed in other browsers for some time, but they're welcome additions to Firefox. In our preliminary tests, JavaScript performance is also massively improved as well - it's notably faster than Firefox 3.0.

You can grab the new version of Firefox from the usual place - we had to upgrade manually as the built-in update feature seems to be playing the devil at the moment.

Discuss your experiences with the new version in the forums.