Mozilla director Mike Beltzner and infrastructure engineer Vladimir Vukicevic stopped by our offices today to demonstrate the upcoming Firefox 3.5 -- including performance improvements, advanced audio and video support, and some slick tabbed browsing enhancements, among other features A new release candidate was issued today, and they're aiming to ship the final version by the end of the month.

In the process of getting the rundown, I asked for their take on Microsoft's new "Get the Facts" campaign in which the Redmond company declares itself the winner against Firefox and Chrome in seven out of 10 categories -- security, privacy, ease of use, developer tools, reliability, compatibility and manageability.

"That got passed around the office -- a little bit more as humor thing," Vukicevic said.

"It's marketing, I guess," Beltzner added.

Rather than address the Microsoft claims point-by-point, Beltzner said it's interesting that Microsoft is now talking about the browser market in competitive terms -- acknowledging and publicly comparing itself to the competition in a way it didn't in the past.

"They seem nervous," Beltzner said. "They're spending a lot of time talking about why people want to choose a browser, which is good for us, because I think if you're at the point where you're choosing a browser, it's going to work out in our favor."