Firefox 8.0 Released 383
Today Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 8.0. The headline features this time around include adding Twitter as a search bar option, tab loading tweaks, and the default disabling of addons installed by third-parties. "Sometimes you download third-party software and are surprised to discover that an add-on has also installed itself in your browser without asking permission. 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." Here are the release notes and download links.
best FF upgrade yet (Score:5, Informative)
Completely smooth upgrade, no incompatible plugins, and lazy tab loading is the best feature ever for tab-crazy people like myself. Since they got the memory use under control in v7, life is good. With Chrome taking up 2-3x more memory than FF, I just can't deal with that anymore. Plus lazy tab loading is now my killer browser feature. Gotta have it. I think FF9 (Dec 20) or FF10 is supposed to have even more substantial memory reduction applied.
Yet another version, still no MSIs or GPOs (Score:4, Informative)
I know FF is multi-platform but you cannot even make GPOs an add-on. (It kinda defeats the purpose if the user can uninstall the add-on!)
Meanwhile in bug 267888 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267888 [mozilla.org]) there are still talking about creating ADM files.
ADM files are for Windows XP, when this bug was created 7 years ago!!!)
Windows 7 uses ADMX files.
But it doesn't matter now.
The people that need MSI/GPO cannot handle Full versions of FF coming out every 2 months.
They have enough trouble keeping up with "patch Tuesday" from MS.
Re:You mean... (Score:5, Informative)
> It's only Firefox that's running around screaming
> about their version numbers.
Screaming where? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ [mozilla.org] doesn't say what version you're downloading. Updating from Firefox 7.0.1 to Firefox 8 never says anything about Firefox 8; the experience is exactly the same as the update from 7.0.0 to 7.0.1.
> I don't see Google screaming about every new
> Chrome release that comes out.
It does it just as much as Mozilla does. Compare http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/10/chrome-stable-release.html [blogspot.com] and http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/11/08/mozilla-firefox-adds-twitter-search-and-new-features-that-make-web-browsing-easier/ [mozilla.com] which are both the official announcements for Chrome 15 and Firefox 8 as far as I can tell.
What exactly makes the latter "screaming" while the former is not?
Re:Negative comments (Score:5, Informative)
The sanity of the Firefox team is under question as of late. From what I can remember:
* Incrementing the major version number with every slight tweak is annoying.
I understand that this annoys some people. But both Chrome and Firefox do it now, and benefits and detriments are well known. It's not a perfect approach, but it does have its advantages. I don't think both Google and Mozilla are 'insane' ;)
* Worse yet, the reasoning behind it is stupid. They just want their version number to be big, like IE.
The main reason for Chrome and Firefox doing this is to get improvements faster to users. Rapid releases allow that.
Mozilla also has the reason that it is following Google's lead. Google started with this version numbering scheme, and not inventing a new one is better for everyone - less confusion.
* Major feature creep: they keep talking about the browser as an OS, and 3D acceleration, and stuff that has no purpose in a browser.
That is a long discussion, for sure! But this is nothing to do with Firefox. All browsers are including 3D acceleration (well, except for IE) and other OS-like features. Google is even pushing native code in the browser (which I think is taking things too far).
* The long-standing issues about Firefox are being ignored: primarily memory and performance.
We are working very hard on those issues. If you try this release, I think you'll see significant improvements on both issues, and there are even more in the pipeline for the versions coming up afterwards.