Firefox 3.5 RC Lands, Final Version In June

It has been an age coming but with the first Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate launched today it looks like the massive overhaul is almost complete.

What's new the latest version?

• 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 and elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms
  
• Now available in 70 languages

Strangely Mozilla listed the same qualities for Firefox 3.5 beta 4 so we're into spit and polish time - unsurprising since it hopes to have 3.5 out before the end of the month. Other central aspects to Firefox 3.5 are the new Gecko 1.9 rendering platform which is more than twice the speed of Firefox 3.0.x and a private browsing mode.

I'm running the new version now and happily it seems to play nice with virtually all extensions that worked with previous betas. That said, the continued lack of Google Gears compatibility does cause a few sniffles.

Grab it now from the link below...

Link:
Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 1