Mozilla confirmed that it is scheduled to release Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday morning.

Mozilla is scheduled to release Firefox 3.5 on Tuesday morning.

"The Mozilla team is mobilizing to ship Firefox 3.5 and it's looking like Tuesday morning," a Mozilla spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

Tuesday's unveiling will come after three Firefox 3.5 release candidates in three weeks.

The first RC was made available in mid-June to about 800,000 beta users. The June 22 RC2 then incorporated feedback from the RC1 beta users, as did the final June 25 RC3.

Firefox 3.5 will include a private browsing mode that hides browser activity, a sped-up JavaScript engine known as TraceMonkey, new location services, and support for several emerging HTML 5 features.

HTML 5 support will allow the browser to natively play video encoded in the open source Ogg Theora format and Ogg Vorbis audio, which provides for manipulation and editing of video without the use of an external program.

Firefox 3.0 made its debut in June 2008, and heavy demand for the updated browser prompted Mozilla to delay its release for several hours. When it finally went live, the company reported an estimated 14,000 downloads per minute, and a total of 8 million downloads in 24 hours.

Firefox is now used by 300 million people, up from 175 million last year, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, told PCMag.com last week. Global market share is now at 22 percent, and in some countries that number is closing in on 50 percent, he said.

Beltzner said he expects the cumulative number of Firefox downloads from its Web site to surpass 1 billion shortly after Firefox 3.5 ships.

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 5pm Eastern time to clarify Beltzner's comments regarding expected Firefox 3.5 downloads. Also, check out PCMag.com's full review of Firefox 3.5.