Just yesterday Firefox 3.5 was officially moved from Release Candidate to an official release and if you fully update your Firefox you will receive the 3.5 version. So why am I posting this if it's an update? Well there is some really cool new features in the release that are definitely worthy of mentioning.

Firefox 3.5 for starters is faster, in fact according to recent benchmark tests, its is over twice as fast as 3.0 which moves it to the third fastest browser with Google Chrome still being number one.

The coolest new feature in my opinion is the new HTML 5 <video> tag which supports the free, open Ogg video container that is part of the new HTML 5 standard that is being worked on. This tag is important because it means videos can be placed directly into a site like YouTube without the need of an additional plugin such as Flash or Silverlight. And the video can actually interact with the rest of the page. Firefox 3.5 is the first browser to support this new tag and you can find an example of this video format at over at dailymotion.com or you can watch the What's New video from Mozilla. Keep in mind that HTML 5 is a work in progress and so there will be improvements to the standards as time goes on (and since currently Firefox 3.5 is the only browser that supports <video> you will need that to see the them in that format).

And taking a page from the Chrome book (Chrome borrowed quite a bit, but isn't that the point of software, why re-invent the wheel? Just improve it) 3.5 now includes a "Private Mode" that doesn't keep any of the history/cookies/data/cache from the pages viewed in the private mode will not be kept. <Fill in your own joke about using this for naughty purposes instead of keeping Christmas shopping a secret>.

For more info, you can check out What's New video of page (if you don't have the latest Firefox or are using another browser, they have Flash version too). Or better yet, download it and give it a try for yourself and enjoy browsing safer, faster, and smarter.