Great news from the Mozilla Foundation: after announcing the release of Personas 2.0 yesterday, Mozilla has now announced the release of the 5th Beta version of the Firefox 3.6 browser. Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 is available for download to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux users alike. The browser comes with support for 70+ languages, so make sure to get the localized version that suits your needs.

“The Mozilla community released Firefox 3.6 Beta 5, making it available for free download and issuing an automatic update to all Firefox 3.6 beta users. This update contains over 100 fixes from the last Firefox 3.6 beta, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. Over 70% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta. The Mozilla community appreciates your feedback and assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox,” announced Firefox Director, Mike Beltzner.

If you already have Firefox 3.6 Beta installed, you will receive an update prompt. If you do not have Firefox 3.6 Beta, check out the download link at the bottom. The regular Beta warning applies: Firefox can prove to be unstable, can crash, can lose data, and so on.

On the upside, here is what you can expect to get from Firefox 3.6 Beta 5:

• - As mentioned by Mike Beltzner, more than 100 bugs have been fixed – 127 bugs have been fixed, to be more precise. Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 thus provides better stability, security and performance, compared to previous versions.
• - The manner in which 3rd party software integrates with the Firefox has been changed to provide enhanced browser stability.
• - HTML5 File API support. This means the user would be able to load images to a web application without having to upload them to the server, for example. The images can be edited and saved locally, and they could optionally be uploaded when ready
• - Built-in support for Personas.
• - The number of supported languages has been increased (support for more than 70 languages).
• - The ability run scripts asynchronously and thus speed up page load times.
• - New API to give add-ons access to Firefox’s geolocation features
• - The Firefox components directory is locked down.
• - A mechanism that prevents Firefox from crashing when dealing with incompatible software.
• - Built-in support for Firefox Personas.
• - The user will be alerted when a plugin needs to be updated.
• - Full screen and poster frames support for open, native video.
• - WOFF font format support.
• - The performance of the JavaScript engine has been enhanced.
• - New CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies support.

If you would like to get Firefox 3.6 Beta 5, a download location is available here.