Firefox 3.5 was officially released yesterday, and it’s already doing nicely. In fact, as MG Siegler at TechCrunch pointed out, it was being downloaded at a rate of nearly 100 downloads per minute yesterday. You can see how it’s doing for yourself at the Mozilla download tracker. In terms of individual countries, the United States is the only country with more than a million downloads. Germany, Japan, France and the United Kingdom round out the top 5.

Seth Rosenblatt at CNET said the latest Firefox “represents the best Firefox we’ve yet seen from Mozilla.” There are some new features; this is the first Firefox to have the Private Browsing feature, which keeps private information from being stored in the browser’s cache and history. If that’s going too far, there’s also an option to clear your browsing history. In Firefox 3.5, you can also specify about how long you’d like to erase the records, so if you’d like to get rid of the past hour, but not the history from yesterday, you can do that. You can even delete an individual site, if you like.

Rosenblatt also points out that Firefox 3.5 now supports standards such as International Color Consortium profiles and the Ogg Vorbis audio and Ogg Theora video formats. HTML 5 is a big part of why the browser can do this; the <audio> and <video> tags don’t work with Firefox 3 and earlier versions.

Another positive that will likely make Firefox 3.5 is its speed. Rosenblatt said that the JavaScript implementation is part of why the browser is faster than its predecessor. His tests prove that Firefox 3.5 is speedier than 3.0.11, but not as fast as Google’s Chrome browser.

A lot of what I’ve read suggests that the browser wars are heating up again. Firefox is making gains on Internet Explorer’s market share, but Safari and Chrome are, too. And I’ve read some positive reviews of the beta of Opera 10, which I’ve used and I also like. It seems like every time the pundits declare the battle for the desktop is over, a new one begins.

For more on some of these technologies, take a look at a few related articles:

How Firefox Works
What’s new with Internet Explorer 8?
How Web Pages Work