While the Web is still buzzing about the Google’s latest piece of software, Google Chrome, Mozilla has quietly released the second Alpha of their next version of Firefox, 3.1.

The new release is already available for download for developers and testers. According to Mozilla Developer’s blog, Firefox 3.1, code-named Shiretoko Alpha 2, is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox.

As you can imagine, because the battle of the browser is heating up, Mozilla intends to surprise us with some interesting goodies.

For example, amongst the new features included in Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 are the support for the HTML 5 <video> element and initial support for web worker threads.

Also, in the new browsers the users will be able to drag and drop tabs between browser windows and Firefox 3.1 will include also support for CSS 2.1 properties and CSS 3 properties.

According to several media reports, a release date for the first beta version of Firefox 3.1 has not been announced. However, apparently the Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 will be available sometime in October.

Until the release of Google Chrome, Firefox was considered to be as the main competitor of Internet Exploere. In just four years, Firefox has managed to achieve a 19 percent market share and its latest version, Firefox 3.0 had over 8 million unique downloads the day it was released.

However, with Google Chrome on the market and the new version of Internet Explorer, 8.0, just around the corner, Firefox’s battle has just become more complicated.

It will be interesting to see how the new version will help Firefox to stay ahead in this third-way battle.