In an effort to win back some lost browser ground to rivals IE and Chrome, Mozilla has made the latest version of its desktop internet browser available for download. The company claims that Firefox 15 will speed up your web browsing experience by reducing memory usage, whilst browsing with certain add-ons. According to Mozilla, this enhancement results in smoother and more responsive web surfing for users.

Additionally, Firefox 15 incorporates support for compressed textures, enabling game developers to employ video memory in order to develop graphically intensive web-based gaming titles, without losing performance.

Mozilla also stated that Firefox 15 will allow for smoother and slicker animations via its improved JavaScript rendering engine, as well as additional enhancements to WebGL performance. Firefox now also includes native support for the Opus audio codec, an open-source format that provides improved compression rates over other formats such as Ogg or AAC.

Windows, Mac OS and Linux users new to Firefox can download the browser (approximately 17 MB - Windows PC version), whilst Firefox users can click on the About Firefox section under Help within their browser to upgrade (just under 12 MB for Windows PC) to the latest version.

In related news, StatCounter recently released its latest global desktop browser usage figures, which showed that Google’s Chrome upped its stake of the browser market from 32.76% in June to 33.81% for July, with Microsoft’s IE close on its heels at 32.04% (down from 32.31%). Completing the top 3 is Firefox and its 23.73% share, a slight decrease from June’s 24.56%.