Mozilla Corp. has delayed the release candidate of Firefox 3.5 from this week ‘til next, but NBR's tests reveal it'll be worth the wait - this fox is blazingly fast.

Typically the browser itself will ship two weeks after the release candidate, allowing for final bugs to be fixed, which means the company will be pushing it to reach its end-of-month deadline for Firefox 3.5's final code.

With the stroke of a pen, Firefox 3.1 has become Firefox 3.5. Mozilla says TraceMonkey, Private Browsing and other “awesome” new features excuse the arbitrary jump.

Skipping version numbers to create the impression of an accelerated update schedule is nothing new (anybody remember Microsoft skipping over a few numerals to “catch up” with WordPerfect?).

However, in this case Mozilla says the cheeky bump-ahead warranted.