Firefox 3.5 RC 3 Available

The third release candidate of the long anticipated Firefox 3.5 is now available. Its probably a bug fix release as the release notes does not work and/or have not been made. Clicking the Release Notes link under download links you to Mozilla’s 404 Error Page. You can use the Firefox 3.5 Release Notes for now.

To update, you can use the Check for Updates in the Help menu (if you are on an administrator user account or running Firefox under admin) or you can download the latest version from the Firefox Pre-Release Download Site.

Firefox Pre-Release Download Site (Mozilla)

Technorati Tags: Mozilla,Firefox,RC,Release,Candidate

Firefox 3.5 RC Update Pushed to Beta/Preview Testers

The long anticipated update to Mozilla Firefox updates again. :) If you have been using Firefox 3.5 recently like me, you can receive

From the Beta Download site, you can download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4. But from there, pressing the Check for Updates button would update your Firefox to a version known as 3.5b99, which is a preview version, between beta and RC.

Just today, another update has been pushed out. This one happens to be the Release Candidate.

From CNET:
"Because of the 800,000 or so testers that Mozilla says have been using the beta versions, Firefox director Mike Beltzner said that he expects this to be the sole release candidate before version 3.5 goes public at the end of June"

That is certainly great news. More than one year after Firefox 3.0, the what was supposed to be a minor update 3.1 released in December is now 3.5 and contains many new features.

There aren't really any noticable changes between the beta/preview and the RC. Just expect it to be more stable.

Here is an excerpt from CNET:
"The upgrades to Firefox 3.5 have been well-documented by now. Private browsing, geolocation, faster performance than Firefox 3 for both loading pages and running JavaScript, local storage for better offline support, and native video for Ogg/Vorbis. If you're running the release candidate or one of its beta predecessors, you can check out Daily Motion to see how the non-Flash based video playback performs.

More improvements include support for HTML5 tags such as < video > and < audio >, native JSON support, support for Web workers so browser-based apps can run in the background, support for CSS and SVG standards, the ability to erase browsing traces by site or by time, personas for easier theme management, and downloadable fonts. The release candidate is also available in more than 70 language localizations."

Theres a nice new shiny Firefox logo too.


Learn more at CNET and Mozilla Developer site.

Note: In Firefox 3.5 RC, it doesn't seem to actually say RC anywhere except the welcome page. The About window just shows 3.5.

Update 6/19: Firefox 3.5 RC 2 is now available for download here. Fixes a few bugs and stability issues found in RC 1.

Windows 7 RC is now available!

Many of you probably know that the Release Candidate version of Windows 7 is now available. You can easily download it until July 2009, so you have plenty of time. The RC expires on June 1, 2010, however, it will be shutting down bi-hourly (every 2 hours) starting March 1, 2010. You will get an alert 2 weeks before this occurs. Read about the installation here.

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Page

To receive your product key, click here, then scroll down and select the appropriate info. Then log into your Windows Live Account, fill out the application (if you haven't already done so in other places) to get your product key. Or you can just get the list of keys here, since there is only a limited number of keys meaning everyone is basically getting the same keys, just like with the beta in January 2009.

But for those of you that don't want to use an ActiveX Control to download here are some direct download links from Microsoft. These DO support Download Accelerators, so you can perform multi-part downloads. Use these links to download if you do not wish to use the ActiveX Downloader and/or wish to use other browsers (other than IE) and/or Download Accelerators.

Download 32-bit (x86) Windows 7 RC:
English
German
Japanese
Spanish
French

Download 64-bit (x64) Windows 7 RC:
English
German
Japanese
Spanish
French

Note: Occasionally, these links download a useless 110 KB ISO with the same name. If this happens, like it did to me, just try again a few times. The ISO is 2.36 GB so it may take a few hours depending on your network speed.

I am downloading the English x86 version right at this moment. Leave any comments you may have in the comments section!