In an effort to improve the level of Firefox’s visual and interactive polish, Alex Faaborg will be posting a short list of top-priority user experience bugs every Monday morning between now and the Firefox 3.1 launch. He writes, “These bugs will involve fixing some rough areas of Firefox 3′s UI, landing icons that we meant to land before shipping, and trying to make sure every last pixel is perfect.” The team could use some help getting these bugs finished up and closed off, so if you have the time and are interested in helping out, you are encouraged to dive in and get started. Additionally, if there are polish issues that drive you nuts, Alex asks that you file bugs for those and leave a note in the comments of his post.

The second alpha version of Firefox 3.1 is now available for download. Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 is built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, and it is important to note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 introduces several new features to the browser, including: support for the HTML5 “video” element, initial support for web worker threads, support for dragging and dropping tabs between browser windows, a new selector to create areas of Aero-style “glass” in XUL, support for new CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties, performance improvements and new preference values for color management profile support.

Please note that this alpha release of Firefox 3.1 does not include the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine — TraceMonkey is available in nightly builds and is currently disabled by default. For more information see the TraceMonkey wiki page.

If you’re planning to download and test Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2, you should first read the release notes and the Firefox 3.1 for developers article. More information and download links are available in the DevNews release announcement.