Firefox 3.5 Launching Today

It’s been a long wait but it’s finally here.

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?