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Mozilla emphasises that this is not a full beta and requests that reviewers and bloggers do not 'jump the gun' and say that it is. It also warns that some extensions may not work until testing has been completed.

Firefox 1.5 includes a new version of the Gecko rendering engine plus an overhauled software update architecture.

The RC builds for Linux, Mac and Windows can be downloaded from www.mozilla.org.

Meanwhile the chief developer of the Mozilla-based Camino browser for Mac OS X has taken a job with Google to work on the Firefox team. Ironically this is good news for Camino, as Google employees get 20 per cent of their working time to focus on their own projects.

'A lot of that time will be directly spent on Camino,' Mike Pinkerton writes in his blog 'That's right, I'm (indirectly) getting paid to keep working on it. That's going to be a big help with the push for 1.0 coming up this Fall. In addition, just as Josh blogged not so many months ago, there is plenty of Mac-specific work that benefits all Gecko browsers, and now there's one more Mac guy available to help out.'