Firefox 3.5 RC ready for download

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 19 Jun 2009 at 12:14

Firefox 3.5 RC has been opened up to the general public.

The update started life as the 3.1 upgrade, but grew in scope and eventually forced developers to bump its version number to 3.5.

Early in June the beta version of the code was shipped to testers, and soon after it entered a "preview" stage that hovered somewhere between beta and Release Candidate.

Beta testers were given access to the Release Candidate earlier this week, and now the software is being made available for direct download.

The 3.5 update includes the long-awaited Private Browsing Mode (or porn-mode as it has come to be known online) for trail-free surfing.

It also marks the release of the TraceMonkey JaveScript engine, which should speed up browsing by adding native-code compilation.

There is also support for two new HTML tags; video and audio, as well as new CSS properties and offline data storage as set out in HTML 5.0.

The Mozilla website still lists several known issues with the software, which should be ironed out before an official public release. Earlier this week Mozilla announced that 3.5 would ship to the public by the end of June.

One of the more subtle changes in 3.5 is the new Firefox logo, which has been slightly refreshed by the Icon Factory.

You can download the release candidate of Firefox 3.5 from Mozilla's website.