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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.
Firefox 9.0 will be out next week.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
* Worse yet, the reasoning behind it is stupid. They just want their version number to be big, like IE.
* Major feature creep: they keep talking about the browser as an OS, and 3D acceleration, and stuff that has no purpose in a browser.
* The long-standing issues about Firefox are being ignored: primarily memory and performance.
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.
> It's only Firefox that's running around screaming
> about their version numbers.
Screaming where? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ 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 and http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/11/08/mozilla-firefox-adds-twitter-search-and-new-features-that-make-web-browsing-easier/ 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?