With Firefox 3.5 only recently out of the door, the developers are eager to show what they've been working on in the mean time. The Mozilla Developer Center announced the first alpha of Firefox 3.6 for developers, which focuses on a lot of back-end improvements.

Codenamed Namoroka, Firefox 3.6 is based on Gecko 1.9.2 and will sport some enhancements to the rendering engine, including: phase 1 support for native widgets, several new CSS3 properties (background size, gradients for background images, ...), and more.

For the average user there will be several improvements as well. TraceMonkey has received a performance boost, keeping it up with Nitro and V8, while a lot of work is going into improved UI responsiveness for a smooth experience.

As previously stated, this release is for developers only and is not intended for the general public yet. So be aware and download this release as you see fit, but don't forget to report your bugs!