Firefox 8 Now Available What's New

What's New in Firefox 8, and Why We're Waiting For Firefox 10

Mozilla's latest browser makes steady progress towards its larger goals with Firefox 10, including a new tab page and silent background updating.

Another month and a half, another Firefox release--true to the Rapid Release name, Mozilla has cranked out version 8 of its browser and should have version 9 finalized just in time for the new year. The official release hasn't quite happened yet, but the finished browser is available to download a bit early as usual. The browser still can't perform silent updates--those are hopefully coming in Firefox 10--but the new version will be available via the "About Firefox" menu once Mozilla pushes it live.

Mozilla's made some smart tweaks this time around. The browser now asks for permission when installing third-party apps (like those awful toolbars) and can selectively load the active tab at launch to reduce startup time. Tab animations have also been improved when rearranging pages on the tab bar. All good news for current Firefox users, but nothing that will draw the Chrome faithful away from Google's browser. For that, Mozilla will have to pin its hopes on Firefox 10 and 11.

Firefox 10's section in the Mozilla Release Tracker lists a number of exciting features the development team hopes to accomplish for the January 2012 release. The improved location bar results look cleaner and easier to navigate, with a cool option to fine-tune the results by deleting certain entries. The update will include a Chrome-style New Tab Page with top sites and a way for Chrome users to migrate bookmarks, saved passwords, etc.

The big change is silent updating. Mozilla wants to move the update process into the browsing session, so that Firefox will shut down and start up quickly even when it has a new update to apply. Two parts of the silent update project are listed as "At Risk" in the tracker, meaning they might not make it for version 10.Hopefully that won't happen--but if it does, version 11 will be the real Firefox update to look forward to, thanks to a long-awaited in-content UI change, a panel-based download manager and web apps integration.

In the meantime, we have smaller updates in Firefox 8 and Firefox 9. Here are FF8's full release notes:

• Add-ons installed by third party programs are now disabled by default
• Added a one-time add-on selection dialog to manage previously installed add-ons
• Added Twitter to the search bar
• Added a preference to load tabs on demand, improving start-up time when windows are restored
• Improved tab animations when moving, reordering, or detaching tabs
• Improved performance and memory handling when using <audio> and <video> elements
• Added CORS support for cross-domain textures in WebGL
• Added support for HTML5 context menus
• Added support for insertAdjacentHTML
• Improved CSS hyphen support for many languages
• Improved WebSocket support
• Fixed several stability issues