It's been a long wait through many beta versions for the final versions of Firefox 3.5 to show up. Today, Mozilla Director Mike Beltzner has a post up confirming that "we're setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, May 20th for Firefox 3.5 RC." He adds that the official Release Candidate for the browser will arrive in the first week of June.
Beltzner's post says that Mozilla is working on 52 remaining code blockers and 12 non-code blockers, with "great progress" being made. "The finish line is very much in sight!" he writes.
I've been using all of the beta versions of Firefox 3.5 (previously named Firefox 3.1), including the current Beta 4, and it's a step ahead in many ways that go beyond fast overall performance and much faster Javascript speed. Private Browsing Mode and Location Aware Browsing for geo-location based applications are highlights.
Of course, the primary reason that many of us use Firefox is that there are thousands of useful extensions for it. Some of my favorite extensions don't work with the beta versions, so I'm looking forward to a final version 3.5 that will support all of them.