Mozilla.org released milestone 0.9 yesterday, inching ever closer to its goal of a feature complete, standards compliant, open source web browser.

The 0.9 milestone release is mostly a performance release with some significant rewrites in a couple of spots. Some of the biggest changes you'll notice:

• Automatic Proxy Configuration has been implemented.

• Personal Security Manager 2.0 with improved performance and new UI.

• MailNews front end has been overhauled with a huge performance improvement.

• Browser and Mail now utilize a new cache, and new view manager for improved performance and correctness.

• Late loading of java has been implemented for improved startup performance and footprint.

• Long-click means of invoking contextual menus on Mac now implemented.

• Image rendering library was rewritten from scratch for increased performance.

The final beta milestone is expected to hit by the end of May. Any release after 0.9.1 could be the official 1.0 release of Mozilla if things go well. So download a copy and use the talkback feature to report the remaining bugs! You can download either from mozilla.org, or find a copy for your platform in the browser archive.