14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 8 is coming, appropriately, on November 8, just a few days from now. Since a new one comes out every six weeks, there aren't any ground-breaking features, but there's still plenty of new things in there so you're bound to enjoy at least some new features.
So, just as Mozilla is getting ready to roll out the new Firefox, here are the most notable features in the upcoming major release.
Twitter search is now included
Mozilla has made a change to the default search engines list. Along with the regular default options, Firefox now includes Twitter Search so you can check out the freshest news from the site with ease.
You can now switch to the new Twitter search which means that you can start a Twitter search from the search box, the Awesomebar and even from the "Search Twitter for *" context menu entry.
Tabs load on demand, at startup
One feature that power users are going to be very happy about in the new Firefox is the option of loading tabs on demand, when first starting up. If you're the type of user with at least 20 tabs open at all times, you know that starting Firefox and waiting for all of those to load is quite annoying.
If you choose to enable the "Don't load tabs until selected" option, now in the General tab of the Preferences screen, only the tabs that you see are loaded, the background ones are not. Then, as you click on a new one, those tabs will be loaded as well.
Firefox 8 will check for and disable add-ons installed by third party software
Finally, the big touted new feature in Firefox 8 is the third-party add-on checker. This tool, the first time after you update to Firefox 8, scans the installed add-ons and searches for those installed via and by third-party software, not from Mozilla's Add-ons repository or manually by the user.
Firefox disables these add-ons which more often then not provide no useful functionality, clutter up the interface and slow down Firefox, not to mention worse scenarios.
Once it's done, it presents a list of installed add-ons and gives the user the possibility to enable or disable anything they want.
Since add-ons installed by third-parties will be disabled by default, it is very likely that a lot of people are going to have a much cleaner Firefox and not even know what happened. No more tab animations
One cool feature planned for Firefox 8 has been removed. Firefox 8 was to have smooth tab animations, for re-ordering and tearing them off.
During the beta phase, the feature seemed to perform quite nicely, but Mozilla has recently removed it and it is even disabled in the Firefox 9 Aurora builds. It's safe to say, Firefox 8 won't be getting tab animations.
Of course, Firefox 8 comes with plenty of updates under the hood, but these technical details usually don't interest regular users, apart from the memory performance improvement, perhaps.
Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.