Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 available for download

Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 has a number of speed and performance enhancements

The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of Firefox.

Mozilla described the release – code named Namoroka Alpha 1 – as the "first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox" , as it made it available for download.

Namoroka, aka Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1, has a number of speed and performance enhancements and is, according to the firm, "much, much faster". The release is built on an early version of Mozilla's Gecko 1.9.2 platform, and the foundation cautioned that it was intended for developers and testers only.

Open source evangelist and Mozilla labs technician Christopher Blizzard explained the changes in a blog post. Enhancements, he said, can be seen in the release's TraceMonkey Javascript engine, in its more user-facing geolocation services, and its use of CSS. Blizzard added that more details would follow.

"The compositor landing has made it possible to fix a large number of interactions between web content, CSS and plugins,' said Blizzard. "We’ll be talking about this in a later post as well."

Blizzard said that a full version of this release was likely to be made available much sooner than previous releases.

"Unlike the year that passed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5, we expect that this 3.6 release will be released in a small number of months," he said. " Our main focus for the 3.6 release will be end-user perceived performance, TraceMonkey and DOM performance and new web developer features. Enjoy and test away!"

At the end of last week Google released a beta of its Chrome browser that offers speed boosts, integration of some HTML5 features and greater customisation of the user interface. The firm said that the beta ran some 30 per cent faster than previous versions.