Personas are, to put it bluntly, nothing more than a collection of skins that you can use to change the way the browser looks. At the time Personas was launched – back in April 2009 – the offer of designs you could use to visually customize the Firefox browser was quite small. At the time there were about 500 designs to choose from.

A lot of time has passed since April 2009 and things have not been standing still. The number of designs on the official Personas site (getpersonas.com) has gone up from 500 to more than 57,000. A significant surge in Personas users and designs has been detected in the past few weeks alone.

“There are now over 57,000 personas on getpersonas.com. The past three weeks have been a blur for the Personas team and its contributors. We’ve seen millions of new users join our community and enjoy theming their Firefox. Thousands of designers created over 19,000 personas!” commented the Mozilla Add-ons Team. And with 700 new designs being created on a daily basis, the growth of personas you can use to customize Firefox is going strong.

The surge of Personas users occurred after the release of the final version of Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.6 is not only the fastest Firefox version to date, it provides built-in support for Personas. This means users can change the way the browser looks with a single mouse click. With previous Firefox versions users had to install the Personas add-on before they could do this.

I would like to touch the Firefox 3.6 speed topic a bit. Tests have shown that Firefox 3.6 is 4 times faster than IE8 and 10 times faster than Opera 10.10. Compared to Firefox 3.0, the browser is 3 times faster.

If you would like to get Firefox 3.6, grab it straight from Mozilla here.
If you would like to learn more about Personas, visit the official site here.