Firefox 3.6 – First alpha released

Despite the fact I am personally still using Firefox 3.0x Mozilla already released a first alpha version of Firefox 3.6. It is intended for developers only.

The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox – code named Namoroka Alpha 1 – is now available for download. Namoroka is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

The Alpha of Namoroka / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

• Compositor (Phase 1), which moves Gecko to using one native widget per top-level content document. See this blog post or bug 374980 for more details.
• A new focus model, described here and tracked in bug 178324
• The chromedir attribute has been replaced with a pseudoclass
• Several new CSS3 properties including background size and gradients for background images
• Speed improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
• Startup and responsiveness improvements throughout the application

The final version of Firefox 3.6 is supposed to hit the download shelves within a few month as spokesman Chris Blizzard of Mozilla promises in the blog post Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 – web developer changes.

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