On June 16 Mozilla made available for download the first Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5. Or better yet, the first part of the full Firefox 3.5 RC release. What 800,000 Beta testers will be receiving as an update over the course of the following days is nothing more than Firefox 3.5 RC1 Build2, explained Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla. Beltzner indicated that Firefox 3.5 RC1 was not yet ready for the public to download, install and run.

“We've just released partial updates for Firefox 3.5 beta users which will update them to an early version of the release candidate (the exact version reference is rc1build2: this means it is the first revision of the release candidate for which we'll ship updates, and it required two build attempts). This build is *not* being released on the beta download page; if someone out there wants to get at it, they should first become a beta tester by downloading a beta and then they will receive the updates,” Beltzner explained.

Essentially, Mozilla has split the process of delivering RC1 for Firefox 3.5 into two parts. First off, the open-source browser maker will focus on Beta testers already running earlier development milestones of Firefox 3.5. Only subsequently will the browser hit full RC and be released. “As we find issues with the release candidate, we will fix and rebuild. We're already generating a new version (rc2build2) with several small, localized fixes. We can do this because the small-scope nature of the fixes means that we can re-run a segment of the quality assurance tests instead of starting over from scratch,” Beltzner added.

Not willing to wait for Mozilla to launch the fully fledged RC for Firefox 3.5? Then you have a simple solution; just download the build of Firefox 3.5 RC1 made available for Beta testers. Don't mind waiting a tad longer? Then you should know that Mozilla targets June 19th for the public availability of Firefox 3.5 RC1.

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.