Most of you may already know that the next version of Firefox is already in the works, in fact those of you diagnosed positive for tech addiction would already be using the latest beta. The next release for the worlds most popular alternative web browser, code named Shiretoko was marked version 3.1 until last week, when Mozilla decided to change the version to 3.5 to mark the significant number of upgrades from the previous version.

This latest beta packs a lot of new features and performance improvements from the previous beta. Some major upgrades include:

• Support for HTML 5 <video> and <audio> tags.
• Improved support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties introduced with Gecko 1.9.1.
• Performance and stability improvements in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. It is a lot faster now but still scores 93/100 in Acid3 tests.
• The Private (or Porn) browsing mode has some minor tweaks to add even more privacy.
• Slight changes to the user interface (The add new Tab button is moved yet again).

The latest beta certainly is faster compared to the previous one, and may cut close to the nightly builds of Firefox 3.6. Mozilla plan to launch Firefox 3.5b4 next in a couple of months before shipping out the final (stable) build. If your getting that itch to try out the latest version, then you can go and download it from here, but remember that it may have stability issues so proceed with caution.

Direct Download Firefox 3.5b3 (US English)