With Internet Explorer flaws being an ongoing news topic, it seems that more people are considering using a different browser. The arrival of a new version of Firefox may have happened at just the right time.

Firefox 3.6 features better performance and new features that improve the user experience or allow web developers to do new things.

'Personas' provide an easy way of changing Firefox's look - more than 35,000 different personas are already available. Personas basically control the appearance of the toolbars and status bar, replacing the usual grey tint with other colours or graphics. Some personas also change the colour of the title bar.

When browsing the persona gallery, rolling over an entry with the mouse instantly previews that look in the current browser window. One click is all that's needed to install the persona.

Personas augment rather than replace traditional themes, which make more radical changes to the browser's look.

Also new in Firefox 3.6 is a mechanism for checking that plug-ins are up to date, and if not, making it easier to update them.

There's also support for full-screen playback of open video formats, CSS gradients, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF, for downloadable fonts) and detecting the orientation of the device (where provided by the hardware).

A new File API and drag-and-drop support allow web apps to work more like desktop apps.

Mozilla claims Firefox 3.6 is about 20% faster than 3.5, which in turn was substantially faster than version 3.

Firefox 3.6 is available in multiple languages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.