Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate Available Now!

Editor’s note: Mozilla announced the Firefox 3.5 release candidate on Friday, June 19, 2009 at 4:19 pm PT. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement, reposted below, for more details.

Please note: the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

The Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.5. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.5 can be followed at the Firefox 3.5 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

* This beta is now available in more than 70 languages – get your local version.

* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.

* Support for the HTML5 and elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.

* Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

* The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.

* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

* Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Testers can download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 70 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.5 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.