Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate Now Available
Continuing its new policy of pushing updates to beta testers first, Mozilla has made the first release candidate of Firefox 3.5 available a bit early for those using the beta 4 release. Firefox 3.5 RC1 is actually listed as simply Firefox 3.5 in the update panel, but note that this is not actually the final release.
If you’ve been running beta 4 (or the recent minor update, “Preview”) you can update to the release candidate now by heading to “Check for Updates” in the Firefox help menu. For those of you that have not been running the betas, a download will be available soon.
With a release candidate in the wild, the final release of Firefox 3.5 inches closer — Mozilla’s goal is get Firefox 3.5 out before the end of June.
If Mozilla succeeds Firefox 3.5 will arrive almost exactly a year after 3.0. That’s a long wait in “internet time,” but Firefox 3.5 brings a host of new features — more than were originally planned — and is significantly faster.
Among the new features are much faster page rendering times and an improved JavaScript engine, as well as expanded support for HTML 5, CSS 3 and the latest emerging web standards being used to power browser-based apps like Gmail, mapping services and online productivity tools. There are also smaller changes like an updated user interface, better crash protection and new privacy controls, all of which will bring Mozilla’s browser up to speed with more current releases like Apple’s Safari 4 and Google’s Chrome.
If you’d like more information about Firefox 3.5 and what’s new, check out our links to previous coverage, listed below, or head over to Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard’s blog. Blizzard is about halfway through his 35 days project in which he highlights Firefox 3.5’s new features and even has some examples of how developers are taking advantage of the new tools to push the limits of the web.
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