Firefox 3.5 RC Just Around the Corner

The first Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5, codenamed Shiretoko, is just around the corner. The RC development milestone means that Mozilla is extremely close to wrapping up the successor of Firefox 3.0, released back in mid-June 2008, almost a year ago. While there are voices claiming that Firefox 3.5 RC1 will be made available for download as early as tomorrow, fact is that Mozilla has a test day planned for the upcoming build of its open-source browser this Friday, May 29.

“MozQA is holding a Testday for the rollout of Firefox 3.5 RC 1 which is as close to a release as possible! I don't need to remind everyone of how important this phase is, so we're going to need your awesome testing skills to make sure it’s as polished as possible,” revealed a member of the Mozilla Q&A team.

At the time of this article Firefox 3.5 RC was not yet ready for download. Neither was it at the start of the week, when Aakash Desai from the Mozilla Q&A team indicated that “we're going to be holding a MAJOR testday event on Friday, May 29th, from 7AM - 5PM PDT... for the first (and hopefully only) release candidate version for Fx 3.5! It'll be a day completely devoted to helping test Firefox 3.5 RC 1. There's going to be a lot of fun in our usual #testday channel due to the high amount of traffic.”

Either way, Firefox 3.5 RC is extremely close to delivery. In fact, if the development milestone doesn't ship by the end of this month it will be made available early at the start of June at the latest. Chances are, in this regard, that Firefox 3.5 could be offered to users over a year after the delivery of Firefox 3.0.

Of course, version 3.5 started along back in mid-2008 as Firefox 3.1. Mozilla subsequently bumped the version number in order to reflect the fact that Firefox 3.1 had evolved from a minor to a major upgrade for the open-source browser. The last release of Firefox 3.1 was Beta 3 in March 2009. Between March and April Mozilla took the version of the next iteration of Firefox from 3.1 to 3.5. Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 went live on April 28, and is currently up for grabs. Users are also free to download a pre-RC build of Firefox 3.5 RC straight from Mozilla.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and Firefox 3.0.10 for Windows are available for download here.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and Firefox 3.0.10 for Linux are available here.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and Firefox 3.0.10 for Mac OS X are available here.