The wait is over! Firefox 3.5 has reached the end of its development process. The gold build of the open-source browser from Mozilla, formerly codenamed Shiretoko, was finalized on June 29, 2009, and is now available for download (links are live at the bottom of this article). Mozilla is planning to ship Firefox 3.5 today, June 30, but at the time of this article the availability of Firefox 3.0's successor hasn't yet been announced officially. Still, the final development milestone of Firefox 3.5 has already been wrapped up and the bits went live on Mozilla's FTP servers. It is only a matter of Firefox 3.5 being released to web, but you needn't wait, just grab Firefox 3.5 from the links below for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

“The team here at Mozilla has been working hard on creating features, enhancing performance and adding other awesomeness to Firefox 3.5, and we’re very excited about sharing it with the world,” revealed Mozilla's John Slater on June 29.

Firefox 3.5 has been launched over a year after the release to web of its precursor, Firefox 3.0. Version 3.0 shipped in mid-June 2008 and went on to set a world record for the most downloads of a newly available browser, in excess of eight million in just the first 24 hours. Subsequently Mozilla announced that it was starting development of codename Shiretoko, a browser referred to well until the first half of 2009 as Firefox 3.1. Version 3.1 was rebranded 3.5 to show that the latest iteration of the open-source browser was indeed a major version.

Firefox 3.5 will be available in “more than 70 languages – get your local version. [The browser will come with] 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,” Mozilla revealed for the RC3 build, which was as close to the final milestone as possible.

Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.5 Final for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 3.5 Final for Mac OS X is available for download here.