Mozilla Plans to "Upgrade the Web" with Firefox 3.5 by the End of June

Opera announced on Tuesday that it was "reinventing the web" with Opera Unite. But wait, Mozilla announced on Tuesday that it would release Firefox 3.5 by the end of June, and by doing so "upgrade the web."

We just got a reinvented web and you're upgrading it, too?

Seriously, though, Firefox 3.5 was originally supposed to be released at the end of last year as 3.1, but feature creep appeared to be a factor. It was also important, however, to get the TraceMonkey Javascript engine improvements into Firefox, to better compete with Chrome and Safari.

Firefox director Mike Beltzner told C|Net on Tuesday that there would be a RC build due on Friday, and a release by the end of June, noting:

"We've added technology we think upgrades the Web itself."

There's a pretty large list of features here.

Personally, my guess would there will be a second RC, and the release will slip into July. I could be wrong, but at the very least I hope they've fixed some of the crashing issues that users have been complaining about on forums (and I've seen as well).

Of course, there's always the chance an extension (or multiple extensions) are the cause of all those issues.