Fans of Firefox's beta builds can now download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The latest build contains bug fixes although, according to Mozilla's Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, these were minor stability issues corrected after the release of the first release candidate.

Belzner also addressed some confusion among the 800,000 or so beta users about Firefox's beta-naming conventions. When the beta moves into release candidate mode, he said, it takes on the name of the final version because if no further problems are found the RC build will simply become the public version.

In an interview with CNET earlier this week, Beltzner said that he expects Firefox 3.5 to be released to the public before the end of June. Although that gives Mozilla a week and a half from today, releasing two release candidates in one week could indicate that the final version could come as early as the beginning of next week.

Source: CNET

This was found a couple of days ago but i haven't had chance to update this topic until now.

Firefox 3.5 is rumored to be released June 30th (tomorrow for us in the UK) - we shall see about this in the morning.

For those that might be confused about the version numbers, this version was originally going to be 3.1, but was renamed to 3.5 later to reflect a greater scope of changes than what has originally been planned.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has been released!

What's new in 3.5?

According to Mozilla's release notes:

* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
* Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey javascript engine.
* The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.
* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5, 'video' and 'audio' elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, javascript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

If Firefox doesn't update automatically, simply go to Help - Check for Updates and follow the onscreen prompts/instructions.

:topicmoved: from Breaking News to Mozilla Firefox