Firfox 8 is here. Mozilla has released the latest desktop version of Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Since Firefox 4, Mozilla has been following its rapid release schedule under which Firefox, like Google Chrome, gets updated every six weeks.
Here's looking into all that's new in Firefox 8.
The new version of Firefox adds Twitter as a search option. Twitter is now included as a search option in Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux. Twitter search in Firefox makes it easier to discover new topics, #hashtags and @usernames. Users can select Twitter in the search query box to restrict queries to tweets. Twitter search is currently available in English, Portuguese, Slovenian and Japanese versions of Firefox, with more languages to come in future releases.
With this update, Twitter joins Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon.com, eBay and Wikipedia as search options built-into Firefox.
Firefox 8 has also added a feature to enhance security and privacy. Firefox is now disabling add-ons installed by third parties without permission and asking the user to pick the ones which should be enabled. According to Mozilla blog, "At Mozilla, we think you should be in control, so we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission and letting you pick the ones you want to keep."
Firefox 8 also adds support for a WebGL security feature. It adds support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which lets developers load WebGL textures from other domains in a secure way. WebGL is a new Web standard that allows websites and Web apps to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without third-party software.
Mozilla claims Firefox 8 to be faster than previous versions with improved support for HTML5 and WebGL.
Firefox 8 allows users to load tabs on demand, making it much faster to restore windows with many tabs. Users can enable this option in the Firefox Menu, under Options/Preferences, in the General tab.
Mozilla has also released an update to Firefox for Android. The new features in upgrade include Firefox Master Password, which allows users to protect saved usernames and passwords.
Android users can now also "add icons for any bookmarked website or Web app to the home screen and launch with just one touch," to add better ease to HTML5-based Web apps.
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