Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 alpha 1

The Mozilla Foundation has reached the first milestone in the development of version 3.6 of its web browser Mozilla Firefox. The new version has been codenamed Namoroka and will be released in November if all goes well. Version 3.6 is built around version 1.9.2 of Gecko and contains several improvements to the user interface. One of these is a new graphical implementation for tab switching, a feature that was briefly part of the beta of version 3.5, but was later removed. Below are the release notes for version 3.6 alpha 1:

Namoroka / Gecko 1.9.2 Alpha 1 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

Some of the changes will affect web and platform compatibility. For detailed information about compatibility changes in Gecko 1.9.2 and Namoroka, please read Firefox 3.6 for developers. For a full list of changes, see this list (it’s big).

The following downloads are available:
Mozilla Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 for Windows
Mozilla Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 for Linux
Mozilla Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 for Mac OS X