While Mozilla was promising to release version 9 of its Firefox browser tomorrow, the official download links are live now.

Huge performance changes have been made in this release, while there aren’t any user interface changes that you’ll notice.

The double-digit increases in performance that most are reporting come from a new feature called “type inference”, created by Mozilla developer Brian Hackett. The feature now quickly chooses how to handle JavaScript, which doesn’t require a developer to define a variable. That makes the browser work overtime, but with type inference, the difference in performance is definitely noticeable.

Here are the rest of the changes and updates that come with version 9 of Firefox:

Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
Added support for font-stretch
Improved support for text-overflow
Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
Fixed several stability issues

You can download Firefox 9 for Mac, Windows, and Linux now.

On Friday, I wrote about Mozilla’s Firefox Challenge for charity. The idea is simple; 12 celebs, 12 causes, and the one who raises the most money by January 11th, 2012 gets an additional $25,000 from Mozilla for its charity.

“Which celeb will win?” was the question a few folks have had. Well, we might have our answer before the competition is over. It’s not a celebrity that’s in the lead, it’s a group of geeks calling themselves #TeamJS. JS standing for “JavaScript”, of course. Mozilla allowed anyone to create a team to compete with celebs like Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, and Sophia Bush.

Out of nowhere, #TeamJS has raised over $12,000 for its charity, “Feeding America“.

At the helm is O’Reilly tech writer, David Flanagan. In a post called “Geeks vs. Celebs“, Flanagan calls on his geeky pals to help raise enough money to win the $25k prize in January for Feeding America.

Here’s what Flanagan had to say about his rally for social good:

I want to challenge the JavaScript community, and the web developer community, and heck, the whole geek community to go head to head with the celebrities and raise more money than they can. So I’ve formed TeamJS to compete against the celebs in the challenge. We don’t get the head start of $5k seed money, but we can still win the $25K prize!

While everyone wins during this challenge, especially the charities, this is an interesting narrative to the social good movement on the web. No big names are needed to raise money, just passionate people with big hearts. Geeks have a voice too, and can obviously move crowds in a big way. See the tally below from the team’s Crowdrise page:

I’d love to see celebs like Jason Bateman and Will Ferrell pick up the pace as we enter the holidays. Putting a celebrity name in front of a charity alone doesn’t make the true difference, the passion has to be there too. Get involved by giving money to your charity of choice, and be sure to share your good deed on Twitter and Facebook.

Will the geeks reign supreme? We’ll be watching!

➤ Mozilla Firefox Challenge

This week, creator of Firefox, Mozilla, announced a holiday charity campaign called the “Mozilla Firefox Challenge” in which it has seeded 12 celebrity backed charities with $5,000. The organization that ends up with the most donations by January 11, 2012 will get an additional $25,000 donation from Mozilla.

That’s a total of $85,000 Mozilla will donate to charities over the holidays.

This is what Mozilla had to say about the challenge, which is taking place on the popular charity platform Crowdrise:

Mozilla builds products, like Firefox, that put users in control of their online experience and shape the future of the Web — not for profit, but for good. As part of our commitment to making a difference, this holiday season we’re hoping to get everyone in on the spirit of doing good. So, just like we do with Firefox, let’s turn individual action into global impact together.

Mozilla certainly nabbed a well-known group of celebrities. Here are the twelve of them and their organizations who get $5,000 each to start and could win the $25,000 prize if they raise the most money on their own:

• Paul Rudd, The Rolling Dog Farm
• Will Ferrell, Cancer for College
• David Blaine, Charity: Water
• Barbra Streisand, Cedars-Sinai Women’s Heart Center
• Jason Bateman, City Year
• Christy Turlington Burns, Every Mother Counts
• Sophia Bush, F Cancer
• Seth Rogen, The Alzheimer’s Association
• Sean Penn, The J/P Haitian Relief Organization
• Edward Norton, The Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust
• Jonah Hill, Nothing But Nets
• Zooey Deschanel, The Innocence Project

Donating to a cause that you care about is at the crux of this campaign, but the celebrities have some treats in store for lucky folks who are of the giving persuasion. For example, you could win a signed cowbell from Will Ferrell, a voicemail from Paul Rudd, or a signed copy of the “Elf” DVD from Zooey Deschanel. That’s pretty neat.

Go support your favorite causes and celebrities, and win some cool stuff in the process.

➤ Mozilla Firefox Challenge

Mozilla has announced that it is blocking the official Skype Toolbar. According to the Mozilla Blog, the toolbar is causing “browser crashes and [it] slows down certain processes by up to 300 times.”

The browser plugin, which automatically installs itself to all Firefox user profiles upon installation of the Skype application, lets the the users call directly to the numbers displayed on websites using the Skype application.

“The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week.”

All versions of the Skype Toolbar for Firefox will be blocked in all versions of Firefox.

Update from Skype via TechCrunch:

Based on our initial investigation, we know that downloading the new client will fix for most users any compatibility issues, and we are working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused our users.

Users can download the latest Skype client with the latest included Toolbars OR the latest toolbar installer itself is here.