The wait for the first Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5 is almost over. Mozilla has already produced the first candidates for the Firefox 3.5 RC development milestone, and has made them available for download via its FTP servers. Still, it is important to note that the releases offered by the company are not in fact the fully fledged Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5. But the candidate builds put together manage to signal that Firefox 3.5 RC is indeed just around the corner, although a specific availability deadline has yet to be set in stone.

At the time of this article no less than two builds of Firefox 3.5 pre-RC were offered, the last having gone live on June 16th. The candidate milestones are delivered not only for Windows but also for Mac OS X and Linux. The previous major development testing release of Firefox was Beta 4, which was made available for download at the end of April 2009. Mozilla stated on more than one occasion that it planned to produce a single Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5 and then offer the finalized version of the open-source browser to users.

Since the Beta 4 release in April, Mozilla did offer another interim build of Firefox 3.5. The past week, Firefox 3.5 Preview, otherwise known as Beta 99, was offered for download. Mozilla also pushed the Preview build as an update to in excess of 800,000 users running the Beta 4 of Firefox 3.5. Also last week, Firefox 3.0.11 hit the download pipes with Firefox 3.5 planned to follow. On the launch of Firefox 3.5 Preview, Mozilla indicated that it would take it a couple of weeks at most to deliver the full RC.

The company is currently planning to start pushing Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 1 as an update to users of Firefox 3.5 Beta as soon as June 16th. By the end of this week Firefox 3.1 RC could be made available for download to all users of Mozilla's open-source browser.

Firefox 3.5 Preview (Beta 99) is available for download via this link.