Firefox 3.5 final prepped to ship early next week

The Mozilla team made available another release candidate of Firefox 3.5 last night.

But RC3 is of little interest. What's most exciting is news that Firefox 3.5 will ship early next week.

That's the pledge of the development team, which indicated its final ship plans after meeting this week.

Firefox 3.5 should be considered a major update to its predecessor, Firefox 3.0, which shipped last June.

The open source browser is faster, supports many HTML5 capabilities and offers a private browsing mode as well as open source audio/video streaming capabilities.

Initially, developers planned a .1 release but scaled up the plans after Google came out with its own open source browser, called Chrome, last year.

Looks like Firefox has little to fear -- as of today. NetApplications cited Firefox's market share at 22.5 percent, while Google's Chrome struggles at less than two percent.

Mozilla claims that more than one million people are beta testing Firefox 3.5 at this point. Care to share your thoughts on the near final with this blogger?