Firefox 3.5 Launching Today

After months of release candidates and betas, Mozilla has said Tuesday, June 30 will see the full version of Firefox 3.5 finally released. "The Mozilla team is mobilizing to ship Firefox 3.5 and it's looking like Tuesday morning," a Mozilla spokeswoman told PCMag.

The June 30 release date is roughly one year after the release of Firefox 3.0 and six months after the date the Firefox team had planned to release the update. So what can users expect from a year's worth of work from the Mozilla team? Quite a bit actually. The update was originally pegged as Firefox 3.1 but as the list of functions to be added grew, the team decided a .1 upgrade wasn't enough to communicate the amount of changes that the update would bring.

"The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label 3.1," Mozilla’s engineering vice president Mike Shaver said in April.

Those downloading Firefox 3.5 will avail of private browsing mode (a feature that will bring Firefox in line with competitors Apple, Microsoft and Google), the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine which Mozilla claims is is faster than the SpiderMonkey engine present in Firefox 3.0, browsing based on your location and support for HTML 5 and that's just a few of the new features.

We'll add the download link once it’s released later on today but for now, who's going to be starting their day the Firefox 3.5 way?

[Updated to include link to download. 17:08 GMT]

  • tlch723
    Really, it is coming out today??
    I was using the 3.5 RC and it updated to the 3.5 couple days ago.
    Reply
  • Faster, faster, and faster! Thumbs up for the Mozilla crew for tweaking up this wonderful browser. Memory usage is considerably lower as well. See ya in FF4.
    Reply
  • Pei-chen
    Faster for everything but that darn MySpace is still slow as ever.
    Reply
  • bunz_of_steel
    FF RuleZ I very much prefer it to M$ open port to the kernal call IE. Plugins are gr8 welcome. can't wait to try it!
    Reply
  • Vettedude
    Yes!!!! Go FireFox!
    Reply
  • trinix
    Pei-chenFaster for everything but that darn MySpace is still slow as ever.
    That's just coz Myspace is the problem, not the rest of the world, They even blame AMD and Intel for the performance problems.

    But sweet, finally 3.5 final, I've been using the beta and rc for a while now.
    Reply
  • The final release has been posted on Mozilla's FTP site:
    ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%203.5.exe.

    Enjoy!
    Reply
  • Why wait?
    http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US
    Reply
  • nirvanabah
    trinixThat's just coz Myspace is the problem, not the rest of the world, They even blame AMD and Intel for the performance problems.
    Actually, the facebook VP blamed AMD and Intel, not Myspace.
    Reply
  • trinix
    oops, facebook, myspace, almost the same, sorry myspace :).
    Reply