Mozilla: Firefox 3.5 RC1 ready to roll in 48 hours

Firefox 3.5 is getting closer to completion.

On Tuesday, the development leader on the project said release candidate 1 will b e good to go in two days.

"Right now, the estimate is 48 hours," said Mozilla Firefox team lead Mike Beltzner, noting during a meeting today that the number of blockers has hovered at about 10 over the past five days. 

Once those remaining issues are ironed out, the code will be shipped off to quality assurance before public release. "Build and QA are ... ready to roll," the team's meeting notes say.

RC1 will be a significant milestone for Mozilla. It was originally slated to be a minor update to Firefox 3.0 and due by the end of 2008 but was scaled up to a version 3.5 upgrade after Google's rival open source Chrome browser surprised many when it hit the market last September.  

It's been a longer than expected haul to Firefox 3.5's release. Leaders said the code would ship in late 2008 or early 2009 -- even with the additional features such as private browsing included. 

It's almost here, and it appears just in time: Google's Chrome 2.0 shipped last week.