Mozilla announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.6 alpha release (codenamed Namoroka). It introduces several new features and brings a number of performance improvements to the popular open source Web browser.

Namoroka, is tentatively expected to arrive in 2010. Performance and customization improvements are a major part of the road-map for it. Mozilla is also exploring some new user interface concepts that could be used to augment the tabbed browsing model.

Namoroka also offers several new CSS features. Among these, is the support for CSS gradients, which allow Web developers to paint the background of an element with a color gradient with multiple color stops. It is based partly on the gradient features described in the HTML 5 Canvas specification.

Although Namoroka is still at a very early stage of development, the 3.6 alpha includes very noticeable performance enhancements through the usage of just-in-time compilation and an optimization technique called tracing to deliver faster JavaScript execution.  JavaScript performance in 3.6 is roughly 15 percent faster than in 3.5.  It’s possible that we could see it gets even faster as the development cycle progresses.

Click here to download the FireFox 3.6 alpha1