Firefox 8 Coming Today for Everyone

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 08 Nov 2011

The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox web browser, set Nobember 8th as the release date for the final version of Firefox 8. This means that every user out there will be able to get version 8.0 of the properly good browser from Mozilla’s Firefox site. As usual, the browser will be offered for Linux, Mac, and Windows in a variety of languages – and it will be free, obviously.

The thing is that hardcore Firefox fans already got their hands on Firefox 8 ahead of time. One day early, on the 7th of November, Mozilla made Firefox 8 available on its FTP server. So if you’re anxious to get Firefox 8, get it from Mozilla’s FTP server – or, you could wait until it’s available on the official Mozilla site (Firefox 8 is not on it at the time of writing this).

One question comes to mind: “What can you expect to get from Firefox 8?” Or better yet: “What new bits and pieces does it have to offer?” To keep things nice and short, I’ve put together a list that you can quickly go over. Here it is:
  • A new Add-ons Compatibility Assistant. After installing Firefox 8, the new Add-ons Compatibility Assistant displays all installed add-ons and you will be asked which add-ons you want to keep and which ones you don’t.
  • Add-ons installed by third party applications are disabled by default; third party add-ons cannot install silently by themselves. This is done in order to increase security.
  • There’s a new addition to the list of search engines available in the search bar: Twitter. Twitter is now listed among the search engines in the search bar.
  • Better startup times. When you start the browser, it doesn’t load all tabs from before it was closed; it only loads a tab when you switch to it. This improves startup times.
  • A new Downloads entry in the History tab.
  • Support for HTML5 context menus and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support for cross-domain textures in WebGL
  • Various other performance improvements and bug fixes.

The release of Firefox 8 comes about 6 weeks after the launch of Firefox 7.


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