Mozilla pushes out Firefox 3.5 release candidate

Mozilla has pushed out the first release candidate for Firefox 3.5, following months of beta testing. If all goes according to plan, the final version of Firefox 3.5 will be available before the end of the month. If you're using Firefox 3.5 beta you can upgrade by selecting "check for updates" from the Help menu.

Mozilla claims that Firefox 3.5 has 5,000 new features since version 3.0 was released. Of course, many of those features will be minor changes or improvements that you won't notice. But there are a few biggies, including:

• Improvements to the Gecko rendering engine
• Support for HTML5 and other new web technologies
• Private browsing mode
• New TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
• Support for Location Aware Browsing for geolocation
• Support for native JSON and web worker threads

And if you don't understand everything in the list above, don't worry. Here's what you need to know: Firefox 3.5 is faster and generally more responsive than Firefox 3.0 when rendering most web content. It's worth the upgrade... unless you need all of your add-ons and extensions to work properly. While a number of add-ons developed for Firefox 3.0 are being updated to support Firefox 3.5, there are still many that don't work yet.

Tags: firefox-3.5, firefox-3.5-release-candidate