At the end of April, Mozilla made the most current stable version of Firefox 3.0.x available alongside the latest beta of it successor, Firefox 3.5. We can always expect a software company to play up the advantages of newer code over older code, but Mozilla is putting a lot of weight into the development of its next version of Firefox.

According to their blog, the upcoming 3.5 branch will supposedly be ten times faster than Firefox 2 and twice as fast as Firefox 3.0. They are so excited about these prospects that they've started a new viral marketing campaign inviting Firefox fans to upload videos in which they are doing something "very fast." It's an increasingly common approach to marketing, though still a novel one.

Of course, fast is a relative term. How exactly does Mozilla come up with figures like ten times as fast or twice as fast? Many are curious and have asked just that, with Mozilla saying little aside from "wait for more details." Are we talking rendering speed? Code execution speed? They did mention SunSpider being used as one of their benchmarks, which is specific to JavaScript execution. It is clear Mozilla doesn't want to lag too far behind Google and Apple, both of whom have browsers with impressive script execution specs. You can always snag the betas if you want and try them out, but I hope Mozilla elaborates further on their plans for Firefox 3.5.