Guest post by Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 8 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Firefox for Android. This release appears to be a relatively minor update. Perhaps the main feature of this update is the ability for user control over third-party addons. “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.” A detailed technical description of this new Firefox release can be found in the release notes.
Just upgraded to v8 after reading this article. If they’re going to update every month or two like this, they need to put in a ‘whats new’ screen so that users can get a brief summary of what they fixed/added. I’m sure there’s a page for this somewhere, but even I don’t know where it is.
Edited 2011-11-08 23:03 UTC
Well, the “what’s new” is covered by the release notes the article links to. And the easiest way I know of to access those is Help -> Getting Started, and clicking on the Release Notes link in the top-right of the resulting page.
For the lazy:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/8.0/releasenotes/
Click on “What’s New in Firefox”, result is:
“The latest version of Firefox has the following changes:
Add-ons installed by third party programs are now disabled by default
Added a one-time add-on selection dialog to manage previously installed add-ons
Added Twitter to the search bar for select locales. Additional locale support will be added in the future
Added a preference to load tabs on demand, improving start-up time when windows are restored
Improved performance and memory handling when using <audio> and <video> elements
Added CORS support for cross-domain textures in WebGL
Added support for HTML5 context menus
Added support for insertAdjacentHTML
Improved CSS hyphen support for many languages
Improved WebSocket support
Fixed several stability issues
Fixed several security issues “
A complete list of changes in this version is here:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/8.0/releasenotes/buglist.html
A list of problems that are know about but not yet fixed is shown by clicking on “Known Issues”.
Edited 2011-11-09 01:37 UTC
When are they releasing Firefox 20? Next week?
This new versioning number is f–king annoying.
Mozilla: get a f–king clue and stop giving us this BS version number changes just for the sake of it. Give us a browser that works well in all OSes instead.
Edited 2011-11-09 02:23 UTC
Recently, Toms hardware webiste had their 7th Web Browser Grand Prix:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037.html
Web Browser Grand Prix 7: Firefox 7, Chrome 14, Opera 11.51
Oh, and IE9. It seems, funnily enough, that Firefox has the lowest version number. Chrome updates it version number every six weeks, BTW.
Also BTW, Firefox 7 was crowned the new champion.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.h…
Firefox 8 is a further improvement over Firefox 7.
Forget the made-up criticisms. Download and enjoy the best browser available today.
Incidentally, unlike Google’s Chrome, Mozilla is proposing LTS versions to be released on a slower release cycle for those who want such a thing:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/mozilla-proposes-less-rapid-firefox-release…
Edited 2011-11-09 02:56 UTC
It’s taken Opera over a decade to get to version 11. I still think it’s the best browser out there.
Mozilla has been overrun by the marketing suits. That’s a bad bad sign. This new versioning is strictly for marketing reasons and usually happens when the geeks get sent down to the basement and the suits want to make change for change’s sake. These are extremely minor changes that have bumped firefox a major version number.
Chrome should still be on version 2 or 3, and Firefox on 4.3.
Other way around, actually. Mozilla have decided they no longer care about version numbers at all. There’s no real marketing around it – no big announcements of an 8.0 release. Just another quiet update that happens to change a number that’s not even visible unless you go to the About screen…
Version numbers are extremely important, especially for developers. How do you know which javascript function isn’t working in which browser version? Why does this add-on work in Firefox 6, but not in Firefox (n+3) which came out 4 months later?
Do I need to test my javascript in Firefox 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and Chrome 10, 11, 12, 13, 14? To cover all versions released in the last 6 months?
I’m sick of all of it. In a corporate environment, you want slow, measured version number changes. You can’t just keep upgrading for the sake of upgrading every 6 weeks.
There should be a long term support version of firefox next year. For now, is it possible for you to stay with Firefox 3.6 until it nears the end of support and then go with long term support versions?
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal
I am not a fan of the new version numbering, however, in my experience the quality of firefox has increased quickly in recent months.
Edited 2011-11-09 17:41 UTC
Version numbers are not important but what is is what changes have occurred. Long, slow version changes are especially good for people who are too lazy to pay attention to the changelog.
Shouldn’t you just test for the feature? Either give a warning if the browser doesn’t support the feature or have a backup feature that simulates the behavior with older techniques. I am not a webdeveloper so correct me if I’m wrong.
versions are irrelevant. Mozilla does not care about versioning. If they did they’d keep 4.3 to avoid the bad mouthing from people like you.
What they care about is being able to push changes faster, because otherwise they can’t keep up.
Example, Google docs using new “HTML5” apis, that only Chrome would support for 6month? That’s not possible to compete without updating.
There’s a ton of other such examples. Like SPDY too. Heck we wouldn’t have websockets working right now.
And yeah, Opera has a low % userbase, guess why. They will have to keep up, too.
What I find most annoying (as a webdeveloper) about Opera.
Opera is the only browser that does not support CORS, even IE8 has their own support for it. Firefox with Firefox 8 even supports it with WebGL.
Even in IE5+ you can use a VBScript workaround and get it work if I remember correctly.
Opera does keep up with pretty much everything else.
Edited 2011-11-09 09:05 UTC
lemur2:
Forget the made-up criticisms. Download and enjoy the best browser available today.
Already have. Its called Lunascape.
I do. it’s called NeoPlanet.
Mozilla: have you AT LEAST completed the GTK3 port?
No I hear you say, I guess it would take you until Firefox 99 to do that. Right?
Why the f–k are you releasing this f–king same old browser with this f–king new number then?
Marketing I guess?
f–k you.
Edited 2011-11-09 03:44 UTC
It’s open source, why don’t you do the porting?
Actually, no, not next week.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal
https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:Esr-release-overview.png
Firefox 20 (and Firefox ESR 18.0.2) are proposed to be released on 26th March 2013.
The Firefox release schedule is, of course, now time-based not feature-based.
Edited 2011-11-09 05:07 UTC
I thought about the same thing.. v5, v6, v7…. this is really dumb marketing stuff. Major and Minor releases have a meaning!
“We added a new blue button” means Major release +1 ?
No, Firefox releases are now time-based.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal
Firefox release + 1 now means simply that it has been six weeks since the previous Firefox release. Release + 1 will have whatever new features that Mozilla has been able to incorporate, test and stabilize since the previous release six weeks ago.
This is the same approach as many major projects have undertaken. KDE, for example, releases a minor update every month, and a new version every six months. The current release is KDE SC 4.7.3. KDE 4.7.3 was released on November 2nd, 2011.
http://kde.org/info/4.7.3.php
The previous release was KDE SC 4.7.2.
http://kde.org/info/4.7.2.php
KDE 4.7.2 was released on October 5th, 2011.
KDE 4.8 is due out on Wednesday, January 25, 2012.
http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.8_Release_Schedule
Tuesday, March 6, 2012: KDE SC 4.8.1 release
Tuesday, April 3, 2012: KDE SC 4.8.2 release
Tuesday, May 1, 2012: KDE SC 4.8.3 release
Get it yet?
It is actually a trend now for major FOSS projects to have time-based (rather than feature-based) releases.
For Linux users who happen to like the tabs-on-top-with-no-title-bar look adopted of late by Chrome and Firefox on Windows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firefox.8.0.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Google_Chrome_Screenshot.png
… since this GUI layout does, after all, give you maximum vertical screen real estate, here is a way to achieve the same effect on KDE:
http://oxygenkde.altervista.org/exceptionsguide.html
Enjoy.
I’ll never understand why people get so worked up about a silly little number you never even see while using the product. They could call it Firefox 73.2 AAA – 1400.C, and I still wouldn’t care. New version of firefox available? Download, install, done.
I wouldn’t care if they at least do something significant to justify the new version change. Like finishing the GTK3 port, GStreamer backend, or porting Firefox to Wayland.
Look how old some of the issues are:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627699
Assigned in 2008, FFS.
They can’t fix an important issue in 3 years, but they are too fast to jump from new versions or hide the “http://“ in the URL bar or adding similar bullshit that nobody cares or wants.
Why keep updating Firefox if we get nothing from new updates? Just a stupid f–king version change. They just waste our time and our bandwidth.
f–k you Mozilla. You’re the new Netscape.
Edited 2011-11-09 03:58 UTC
The only change necessary is the change of date in the calendar. They’ve moved to a time-based release schedule rather than one based on features, and I find it superior in every way.
Do you actually use Firefox? I’m guessing not, because compare Firefox 4 with the latest FF8. It’s clearly much better, in just about every possible way. Sure, there is still plenty that needs to be done, but I’m glad they aren’t holding off the small incremental changes just because someone doesn’t want them to make any more releases until their pet issues are taken care of.
Yes I use Firefox since it was called Phoenix, please don’t speak if you don’t know.
I know there has been many improvements since Firefox 4.x like the HTML5, web sockets stuff and performance improvements, but still, bigger tasks like this has never been completed:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627699
That’s why it annoys me, Mozilla jumps to big versions shamelessly and yet they don’t fix issues that has been reported in 2008.
You are 100% correct. Mozilla was a fork of Netscape Navigator.
Mozilla was the rendering engine of Netscape navigator if I remember correctly.
Honestly, I don’t care about version numbers… I use Firefox since 2004, non stop. I have had brief interludes with Chrome, and sometimes Opera, but nothing beats FF…
I now run Scientific Linux 6, and run alongside FF 3.6.23 and FF 8.0…
I can assure you that FF8 is way better !!!!!!
Anyway, I still have Chrome as my secondary browser…
I cannot believe that since version 3.5 the ability to resize the bookmarks window is broken.
Works fine over here, Win 7 x64. Don’t recall seeing any similar issues on any Linux install I’ve had either.
I guess you did not understand my complaint.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=527224
It’s funny people place value on a version number, which is about the least valuable thing of all.
When Firefox informs you of an available update, there is always a link to the changelog/”whats new” so it’s not as if you need to go on a scavenger hunt for it.
FF8 is working great here.
How are those plugins workin for ya? Guess you would not mind being unprotected or have some functionality broken because Mozilla bumped the major version, when it should have been a minor bump.
This comment makes no sense.
The amount by which a version number changes (major or minor) has no affect over addon and plugin compatibility. It makes no difference. If an addon or plugin is incompatible with a new version, then it is incompatible, no matter what the exact form of the change in version number.
PS: Mozilla tests all addons hosted at addons.mozilla.org, and updates their coompatibility if they are compatible. In the past few version updates (namely 4 to 5, 5 to 6, 6 to 7) apparently over 95% of addons have been compatible without any functional changes. All that has been needed is for the addon to report itself as still compatible with the new version of Firefox (whatever its number).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/8.0?type=all
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/7.0?type=all
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/6.0?type=all
Edited 2011-11-10 02:02 UTC
Of the 28 plugins I use, all 28 are working fine. Were they supposed to break because of a “major” version number change?
Why would it leave you unprotected?
The only people who gets to decide what constitutes a “major” or “minor” bump is the project itself.
Not every project subscribes to the “major bump means major changes” philosophy.
They’re working fine here. I’m only using 6, and all 6 of them are working perfectly well in the FF 9 beta I’m running.
This is the norm, not an exception – the new rolling release schedule means that extensions should remain compatible between releases and the automatic testing/compatibility version bumping Mozilla does ensures that extensions don’t get left behind.
Also, I have to respond to this assertion that somehow Firefox is less secure now because of the more frequent releases. That’s dumb, the opposite is true. They are incorporating all the security fixes the old browser had into the new releases, and by making it a moving target hackers have less time to find holes than they did before. As long as you stay up to date with the latest version, you’ll be fine. Sticking with an old version is no different that sticking with 3.6.0 instead of updating to 3.6.1 when it came out.
Edited 2011-11-12 05:27 UTC
Well, I have very negative feeling towards Mozilla’s change to release cycles. For me, the main version number simply means a milestone, certain architecture change, etc. First I thought that it is just a question of becoming used to that, now I know for sure – someone responsible at Mozilla should scratch his head – new versioning system is total crap. Who remembers, what was new in version 5, 6, what was version 7 about, etc.? Did they want just to copy Chrome or IE?
And man – what did they do to Thunderbird toolbar UI? Do they really have any QA there? That theme should not leave even an alpha lab.
Someone should be really took responsible for all that, or they should employ a real manager, because imo even a monkey with a little bit over the zero empathy would revert some decisions back. All this stuff is really annoying ….
Ignoring the version number issue. Do you feel that Firefox has improved since version 3.6?
Generally speaking – yes. Especially in the memory consumption area, but that might be just a feeling.
Look – I am not necessarily criticizing without a purpose – I used Netscape since version 2, and Mozilla since 0.94beta :-)But why did they change the versioning, is beyond my understanding – it is a mess imo. It might not be important for many ppl, but I feel less comfort, can’t describe why.
They at least kept the possibility to keep my tabs below the menu, I find Chrome aproach really distracting – long way for eyes to go from content to tab list. I hope someone “clever” at Mozilla does not remove the option in version 15, which might be out sooner than expected
What would you have said if Firefox started using names instead of numbers? 5=jacky 6=hank 7=trudy 8=mont 9=anne
The main thing about the version numbers is that they don’t matter. Everybody should be on Firefox 8 right now.