Mozilla produced its first candidates of Firefox 3.5 RC1 and it was just a matter of time before the fully fledged Release Candidate would follow. But the RC was actually just around the corner. Fact is that users are now able to download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 1. According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.5 RC1 went live on June16, 2009, and is a release aimed at Beta testers of the open-source browser for the time being. The public will have to wait, in Mozilla's view, a tad longer for the bits to be served directly, though no longer than the end of this week. But no waiting is necessary, as the download links are included at the bottom of this article.

“This is the first release candidate for Firefox 3.5, the latest version of the Firefox web browser. As a member of our beta audience, you are being updated to this version to help test and preview the new version before it is released to the general public,” reads a message from Mozilla from the release notes for Firefox 3.5 RC1.

With Firefox 3.5 RC1, formerly known as Firefox 3.1 – codenamed Shiretoko, Mozilla is bumping the version number of its underlying rendering engine Gecko to 1.9.1. Just as Internet Explorer 8 and Chrome before it, Firefox 3.5 features a Private Browsing Mode, while also offering geolocation capabilities, namely Location Aware Browsing. Mozilla is promising a consistent boost in performance and stability, and has integrated a new JavaScript engine into Firefox with version 3.5, dubbed TraceMonkey. In addition, the next iteration of Firefox now comes with native support for JSON, but also modern web standards elements such as HTML5 <video> and <audio>, new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms, Mozilla explained.

Firefox 3.5 was planned to feature a single Release Candidate, and then move straight to the gold version. However, following the availability of Firefox 3.5 RC1 for Beta testers, Mozilla has also started producing candidates for Firefox 3.5 RC2 and offering them for download via the FTP repository for nightly builds, indicating that there will be at least one more Release Candidate of the open-source browser.

Firefox 3.5 RC1 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.5 RC1 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 3.5 RC1 for Mac OS X is available for download here.