Over the past few months, devs over at Mozilla Corp have been making an aggressive push to forward the development of Firefox 3.5. Along the way, there have been some critical problems to say the least, particularly with the last two beta releases, but Mozilla is now on track to deliver the first release candidate of this new development milestone early next month.

Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, sent out an email last Thursday in which he stated that the team will be “setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, May 20 for Firefox 3.5 RC.” In other words, this “code freeze” means that Mozilla will be halting progress in development in order to get a working RC build out to testers, similarly to what Microsoft has done with Windows 7 RC build 7100.

Assuming Firefox 3.5 RC's code is “frozen” on Wednesday, Beltzner said that the preview would ship as early as the first week of June. According to Mozilla release notes dated May 5th, we can also expect to see Firefox 3.0.11 released on June 2nd or 3rd.

On another note, over 650,000 users are currently testing Firefox 3.5 beta 4, with all versions of Firefox owning 22.5 percent of the total web browser market as of the beginning of the month.