Firefox 8.0 Released

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.

You mean...

[jellomizer]

Firefox 4.04

Re:Negative comments

[bobcat7677]

The instability and other issues mentioned by others have spoiled many people's opinions about Firefox. For many of us, a new version just doesn't matter because any improvement would be too late to matter. Ironically, just this morning I personally reached my final level of frustration and decided to quit using Firefox for good. Having a new version to play with is not enough to make me try it again...mostly because I have completely lost faith in the ff dev team in general. Chrome has been my primary browser of choice for some time (not because of any love for Google, but because it works fast and reliably for me). Safari is my new secondary browser now that FF is going in the rubbish bin.

Re:To bad it isn't 3.x

[RCL]

I personally will not upgrade from 3.6 (on my Windows machines at least) just because of plain stubbornness. I strongly feel that Mozilla as a whole and Asa Dotzler in particular need to be somehow punished for ignoring "LTS" (including corporate and academics) users altogether. I am all for "spread the Firefox hate" campaign.

Call me a troll, but I was a loyal Firefox user since late 2003 (it was called "Firebird" then)... until they started to push versions upon me, destroying binary plugins and losing their identity as a stable browser in the process. Now I'm a Firefox hater.

Re:slow down cowboy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox's biggest problem isn't anything technical - it's that once they DO fix an outstanding issue, no one seems to recognize it. And IMO it would be a crying shame to kill a competent browser because of bad PR.

They've brought that on themselves.

Firefox 4: The release that took away the status bar.
Firefox 5: The release that broke all your extensions, just after you'd installed the one that got your status bar back.
Firefox 6/7/8: The releases that talked about taking away the URL bar, the part of the URL bar that told you whether you were using http:/// [http] or ftp:// [ftp] or version numbers.

Not a single Fx release has touted stability as the main feature of the release; all the buzz is about whatever angel-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin issue that the Fx UX team deems important that month.

Disclaimer: I may have gotten my controversies wrong up there, but that's because I run 3.6.24 by choice. I'm not interested in a cheap copy of Chrome's UX. I'm even less interested in a development team that says "It works fine without extensions, so if you install extensions to replace the features we took out, don't blame us if it leaks RAM like a sieve". Fuck 'em.