In its fifth year of development, Firefox has released a polished official version of 3.6. I've been using the beta a couple of weeks and have been pleased. Not as fast as Chrome, but it does have some compelling features.
The Awesome bar short cut, Personas customization and a claimed javascript performance boost are a few quick mentions. Version 4.0 is expected either late this year or the next.
Following recent warnings from Germany's government to avoid Explorer for security reasons, its citizens have flooded Mozilla's download pages for Firefox. German downloads of the rival browser leaped to about 300,000 above normal.
Matthew Fortner has been at The News & Observer since 2002. He has a passion for gadgets, cutting-edge technology and all things geek.