Mozilla on Friday  announced the availability of Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1.After the 3.52 was released this is the next of the releases but it’s still in Pre alpha stage and its only for developer previews.Codenamed Namoroka, after a national park in Madagascar, Firefox 3.6 is expected to be finalized and released later this year.It uses the new Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine which is also still in testing.

The alpha includes several speed improvements to the java script engine, and potential speed and responsiveness upgrades to the entire browser.TraceMonkey developer Andreas Gal, one of the researchers behind tracing optimization, says that JavaScript performance in 3.6 is roughly 15 percent faster than in 3.5. That’s already a meaningful improvement, and it’s possible that we could see TraceMonkey get even faster as the development cycle progresses.

Firefox 3.6 offers several new CSS features. Among these, the most intriguing is support for CSS gradients, which allow Web developers to paint the background of an element with a color gradient with multiple color stops. This feature was originally invented last year by Apple and implemented in WebKit. It is based partly on the gradient features described in the HTML 5 Canvas specification.

Tab Previews, a feature that was removed in the final beta of Firefox 3.5 has been added says LifeHacker.Mozilla is warning that only developers and testers download this latest alpha.Check out Mozilla Developer Blog for links