Firefox 3.5 RC1 on track for early June

Firefox 3.5, which reached the Beta 4 milestone at the end of April, is now full steam ahead for Release Candidate (RC) status. According to the mozilla.dev.planning Google Group, the code will be frozen next Wednesday (May 20), with the RC release slated for sometime in the first week of June.

The next version of Firefox (previously known as version 3.1, but upgraded to 3.5 due to the amount of new functionality) will include a private browsing mode, the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and location-aware browsing support.

According to Net Applications, Firefox currently has 22.5 percent of the total browser market, behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer (66.1%) and ahead of Apple's Safari (8.21%).