Firefox 3.5 RC released to the world

Firefox 3.5, promising speeds twice as fast as Firefox 3, is now available as a release candidate (RC), with the official final release scheduled for the end of June.

More than 800,000 Firefox 3.5 beta testers are receiving an update to the first Firefox 3.5 release candidate, while a direct link to it is available here.

In addition to the speed increase, Firefox has a private browsing mode the so-called porn mode', or as Mozilla's engineering vice president Mike Shaver called it, in an interview with IT PRO a "job-hunting mode."

Firefox 3.5 users will be able to clear all private data or activity over the past few hours using a feature in the tools menu.

It will have tear off tabs', where users can drag a tab out of its existing spot and open it in a new window. Users can also watch videos in Firefox without the aid of plug-ins using open format Ogg Theora files.

Firefox 3.5 will also have location aware browsing, which allows websites to ask you where you are if you have chosen to share that information.

Already experimented with using the Geode Firefox 3 add-on, this allows a website to ask a user where they are to find nearby points of interest as well as maps of the local area.

Shaver claimed that Firefox was pushing Microsoft to create new browsers as well as improve them.

But he said: "We would prefer it for the health of the web if Internet Explorer was a lot faster."