After a short break in the sun, we're happy to return to the land of Linux and see that Firefox 3.5 has now gone into its second release candidate.

Codenamed Shiretoko, it now has many more new features compared to the 3.0.x releases, including: support for HTML 5, adding <audio> and <video> tags so you can now watch embedded Ogg Vorbis and Theora content, and a new, faster JavaScript engine called Tracemonkey, featuring faster code execution.

  • The new W3C Geolocation API which allows your code to be "location aware".
  • A private browsing mode, dubbed by some as "porn mode" which does not save your browsing history or anything that could trace your activities when in use.
  • Downloadable fonts!
  • Over 70 languages supported
  • Improvements to the layout engine, Gecko, which now allows "parsing for faster content rendering".
  • HTML5 local storage, application storage, CSS media queries, and other new web technologies

Beware! This is not recommended for everyday users, and is only encouraged for testers! You can get it in the following ways: Download it from Mozilla Update from within Firefox (Help > Check for updates...) Add it via APT or your chosen package manager by installing the package "firefox-3.5" or similar.

The final version of Firefox 3.5 should be available to download by the end of June. See the release announcement for more information.

Via TuxRadar