The Mozilla community announced the availability of a release candidate of Firefox 3.6, with a final version expected to be ready by the end of the month.

This preview software is available for free download and has been issued as an automatic update to all Firefox 3.6 beta users. Over 75% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6, Mozilla said.

This release candidate may update itself periodically, and will eventually be exactly the same as the final Firefox 3.6 release itself.

Firefox 3.6 (built on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform) introduces several new features for users and developers:

- Users can change the browser?s appearance with a single click using Personas.
- Firefox 3.6 alerts users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
- Changes to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
- Improved automatic form fill provides better options from your form history.
- Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
- Support for the WOFF font format.
- Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
- The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load
- Support for the HTML5 File API.
- Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Web developers and Add-on developers may read more detail about the many new features in Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center.

The Firefox 3.6 RC can be downloaded here.