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Firefox Personas, the designer skins that let web surfers dress up their browser, are now being rebranded "Personas Plus" and are being moved over to Mozilla's add-on gallery to join the other plugins. With the move, Mozilla has also announced that development work on this popular personalization program is continuing with the addition of new features that will transform Personas from static background images to dynamically updating themes that could even include ambient information.

For all our supposed internet leadership, we North Americans are more likely to use Internet Explorer than people in any other continent in the world. Respected website traffic analysts Quantcast see a whole lot of people flying around the web every day and this morning the company published some browser numbers broken down by continent.

What part of the world has the highest percentage of people who use the best browser available, Google's Chrome? Good job, South America, you're number one. North America isn't just #1 in I.E. use (not that there's anything wrong with that), we're also in last place for Chrome and Firefox. Check out the chart below.

Just a few days after releasing Firefox for the Nokia N900 handset, Mozilla just announced that it is also making good progress on an Android version of Firefox. According to Firefox developer Vladimir Vukićević, development of Android for Firefox is progressing quickly. While there are no plans for the release of an official alpha version just yet, Vukićević has already managed to compile and install an early version of Firefox for Android.

Last week, YouTube announced they will begin supporting the upcoming web standard HTML5 which allows videos to be viewed without an Adobe Flash plugin. Those who wanted to play around with the new HTML5-enabled website were directed to a separate experimental site called TestTube. However, noted the YouTube blog post, only Chrome, Safari, and IE users could give the new site a try. Firefox was notably absent from the list.

Plans to Release it as a Minor Update to 3.6 Instead

Earlier today, Computerworld broke the news that Mozilla plans to "dump" Firefox 3.7 from its schedule and change the way it develops and releases its browser. We talked to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, about these changes. Beltzner noted that Mozilla isn't really "dumping" version 3.7. Instead, Mozilla took a closer look at its development roadmap and realized that there was simply no need to release Firefox 3.7 because the Firefox team now plans to release the most important update to 3.7 as a regular security update to Firefox 3.6.

Mozilla has made the first release candidate for Firefox 3.6 available for download this morning, following a recent announcement that further releases would be delayed.

Firefox 3.6, codename "Namoroka", looks to improve startup time and general responsiveness, among other issues.

If you want to help Mozilla to make Firefox better but you are not a developer, here is your chance. Earlier this year, Mozilla announced the launch of Test Pilot, the organization's new distributed usability lab. Test pilots will be enlisted in various usability tests and will be some of the first to see some of Mozilla's ideas for new user interfaces and Mozilla Labs products. We first wrote about Test Pilot when it was just a "still-in concept platform." Now, however, you can download the Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5 here and begin to help Mozilla make Firefox even better.

Opera just released the first pre-alpha version of Opera 10.5. While most users generally only think about Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome as the major players in the current browser wars, there can be no doubt that Opera is working hard to push browser development forward as well. This latest alpha version shows that Opera has worked hard to speed up the browser. Carakan, the new JavaScript engine in Opera 10.5, is up to seven times faster than Opera's current engine. The new version of Opera also adds a number of new features like an enhanced private browsing mode and a new graphics engine that can be hardware accelerated.

As part of the European Union's antitrust agreement with Microsoft, the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser.

Love or hate the government intervention, it's notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe.

Firefox hit a new milestone today, as version 3.5 overtook Internet Explorer 7.0 with nearly 22% of the browser market, according to statistics from web analytics service StatCounter. This comes on the heels of statistics we saw earlier this month, which showed Firefox overtaking IE for overall usage in Germany.