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In May and June, we covered Mozilla's Jetpack, which is an API and framework designed to make building extensions for Firefox easier and faster. It won't require extensions to be written in XUL, and will allow developers to use standard technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Notably, Jetpack will also allow Firefox users to load extensions without annoying browser restarts, and will resolve compatibility issues between older extensions and newer versions of Firefox. Over the weekend, Mozilla announced a 0.3 update to Jetpack, downloadable now, and provided some information on how the project is moving along.

Mozilla's much awaited Release Candidate of the Firefox 3.5 browser has been through several delays, but, as Webware reports, Firefox director Mike Beltzner says it will arrive this Friday. Beltzner also says the final release of Firefox 3.5 will come out before the end of the month. If you haven't been using the beta versions of the the browser, it's much faster, and has more than 5,000 new features. Mozilla is also pointing out some articles and video demos that show off the new features.?

Is innovation in browsers where it should be? We've reported before on how most of the innovation is going on in open source browsers, as Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to lose market share. This week, at two separate conferences, officials from Google and Mozilla have weighed in on how browsers need to improve. Notably, they primarily agree, and their focus doesn't seem matched by Microsoft with Internet Explorer.

There's a new version of Google's Chrome open source browser available, as the team behind it has announced. Google is citing up to 30 percent performance increases on JavaScript-heavy tasks. I've taken it for a spin, comparing it to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, which also has very fast JavaScript performance thanks to its TraceMonkey technology. The new Chrome does work faster than the Firefox beta at this point, and the performance is another way that Google's browser is maturing and innovating.

While most Windows-based users of Beta 4 of Firefox 3.5 are finding it to be speedy and efficient, and benchmark tests back that up, some Mac-based users are finding it to be slower than previous versions of the browser. Charles Moore, writing on TheAppleBlog, found a speedy solution in the Shiretoko variant of the Firefox beta. He writes: Shiretoko (named after the Shiretoko National Park in northern Japan) transparently picked up where Firefox left off, even opening my saved browser session, and it runs the few Firefox add-on plugins I use as well. Aside from running faster and its distinctive application icon, it could just as well be Firefox 3.5b. Find out more here.?

Mozilla has finally released Beta 4 of Firefox 3.5 (formerly called Firefox 3.1), and this beta is fast and stable enough that I'm using it as my primary browser. You can download it here. As we've noted several times, TraceMonkey technology for faster Javascript performance has been one of Mozilla's goals with this browser since the beginning, and it's in place in this beta. Beta 4 is very fast, and it includes Private Browsing Mode, and Location Aware Browsing, for the growing number of geo-location based applications that are arriving. Here's more on what you get and don't get in Beta 4.