Mozilla posts yet another Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate

It was apparent yesterday, after a test of the organization's latest private daily build of the Firefox 3.5 browser, that Mozilla's developers had discovered a jackpot of performance improvements in some specific areas: JavaScript math, RegEx (regular string expression) searches, and general control flow. Betanews tests yesterday gave the Thursday morning build 8% better overall speed in Windows 7 RC, and a better overall performance index score on that platform of 9.35 versus 8.81, relative to the performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista on the same physical machine.

Now it appears the team is willing to capitalize on that find. This morning, Mozilla's servers made available Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3.5 to the general public. Again, the team makes these public builds available prior to a formal announcement, though word from Mozilla about RC1 was actually rather quiet this week. The possibility of an RC2 in the near term -- just days later -- may have been why.

Betanews has not yet tested this new RC2 build specifically, but if it incorporates the improvements to RC1, here is what Windows users can expect: Pages will render on Windows XP SP3 with 257% the speed of Firefox 3.0.11 (the current stable build), 246% the stable version's speed on Windows Vista SP2, and 259% the stable version's speed on Windows 7 RC. Yesterday's private build was 35% faster overall on Windows 7 RC than on Vista SP2, and 41% faster on Windows XP SP3 than Vista SP2.