We're almost there! The very second (we officially skipped the first for the public consumption) release candidate of the latest in the Firefox family has been released. Firefox 3.5 is set to invade the world (through robots) and offers enough stuff to fight the fiercer competition these days.

With Chrome 2 and Safari 4 already out, Mozilla is currently in pursuit of the competition, which has added features that Firefox 3.0 does not have. Two of the most important features in this release are: private browsing and TraceMonkey. Private browsing allows you to visit web sites without leaving a trace in your history, cache and cookies, which can be handy if you share your PC or Mac with others and want to hide your pr0n. TraceMonkey is the new JavaScript engine for Firefox that significantly boosts performance giving Firefox 3.5 a solid third place amongst the two fighting kings (Chrome 2's V8 and Safari 4's Nitro).

Other compelling features in this release include: a visual refresh for the themes as well as a new icon, ICC color profile support (on by default and with less CPU usage), geolocation support, native JSON, web worker threads support, Gecko's speculative parsing for faster content rendering, HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 is the first available test release that should be acceptable for end users, but may contain a bug or so before final release. If all goes well though, this might end up being the new final release, so be sure to report anything you find!

Update: A third release candidate has been released to address some remaining high priority issues and can be found either through Mozilla's site, or if you're using RC2 by Help > Check for Updates.