The third Release Candidate build for Firefox 3.5 is on its way. Mozilla repeatedly stressed during the development process of the next iteration of its open source browser that it was aiming to produce a single RC for Firefox 3.5. And fact is that it came extremely close to doing so.

The reality is that RC1, RC2 and RC3 are nothing more than variations on the same theme, namely Firefox 3.5 RC. Of course, there also are details that make each development milestone an indisputable separate release, and, in this context, Mozilla has indeed managed to climb all the way to RC3.

On June 23, Mozilla revealed that it was expecting Firefox 3.5 to go to RC3. The reason delivered for the necessity of yet another Release Candidate was the fact that some localized bugs still required fixes. Mozilla subsequently started producing the first candidates of Firefox 3.5 RC. Testers willing to get a taste of what the next milestone on the road to the gold version of Firefox 3.5 has to offer can already download the Firefox 3.5 RC3 from Mozilla.

But because it is designed to deal with localized issues, Firefox 3.5 RC3 is essentially RC2. At the same time, while Mozilla has already made available two separate RC builds, RC1 and RC2 are set up as two parts of the same RC part. RC1 was the preliminary Firefox 3.5 RC delivered to Beta testers, while RC2 was a build considered stable enough to be offered for public “consumption.” Following the launch of RC2, Mozilla indicated that it was pressing ahead with Firefox 3.5 aiming for a release by the end of June 2009.

“The Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is now available for download and testing. We need feedback on several things in this milestone, including all 70+ localizations, new privacy tools, open audio and video, performance and stability improvements, geolocation features, native JSON support, web worker threads, downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, and a whole host of other changes and new features,” Mozilla revealed.

Firefox 3.5 RC2 is available for download here.