Firefox 8 adds some sane usability improvements, making it faster and lighter

Sep 30, 2011 09:52 GMT  ·  By

Firefox 8 is shaping up nicely and has now been graduated to the Beta channel, after spending six weeks in Aurora. As per usual, there are no big, huge new features or updates, but what is new is quite compelling.

Mozilla brags about the new Twitter search feature, but users will find features like the ability to load tabs on demand when starting up or the new third-party installed add-on checker a lot more useful and interesting.

"The latest Mozilla Firefox Beta is now available for testing on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. This beta adds features and user interface elements that make browsing easier and tools that help developers build more secure and innovative Web experiences," Mozilla announced.

Twitter search

As far as user-facing features go, the new Twitter search option is probably the most visible one.

Along with the regular default options, the big three search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, commerce sites eBay and Amazon, and Wikipedia, Firefox also comes with Twitter search by default.

Users could have added Twitter search by themselves, but the convenience of having it already there means that a lot more people are going to use it than they would have normally.

Load tabs on demand on startup

A great feature that is probably going to fly by unnoticed is the option of loading tabs on demand, at first start.

Users that regularly work with a lot of tabs know what a pain it is to wait for, sometimes, minutes for all of them to load so you can get to work on whatever it is you're doing.

With the "Restore tabs on demand" option, found in the Preferences section in the General tab, only the tab that is currently visible is loaded.

When you move to another one, it gets loaded as well. This means that you can get started in seconds, especially since you rarely need more than two, three tabs at any given time.

Add-ons installed by third-party software get purged

One new feature that should really be helpful to a lot of users is a check for add-ons that have been installed by third-party software, i.e. not by the users themselves via Firefox.

These add-ons, typically toolbars but plenty of other types, slow down Firefox, clutter the interface and rarely add any useful functionality. There is also an inherent security risk with these add-ons, which may not be verified by Mozilla.

Now, on first load, Firefox checks for these add-ons, disables them and allows users to manually select the ones they actually use. Moving forward, any add-on that gets installed by other apps will have to be approved by the user explicitly to be allowed to run.

Animations for tab management, reordering, tear off and so on

Firefox has finally added animations to tab management and reordering. This may seem like a fluff update, but it's a huge usability improvement. The small arrow that Firefox used previously to indicate where users were re-positioning the app proved very fiddly in practice.

There are plenty of changes under the hood as well, WebGL now adds support for CORS textures, there are some WebSockets updates and improved HTML5 support as well. You can check out a more complete list of new features for developers here.

Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.