Download Firefox 8 Final for Linux

Dear readers, a few minutes ago Mozilla unleashed the stable version of the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 8.0 web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

Yes, we're talking about the final version of Firefox 8, which is aready available for download on the official FTP site of the Mozilla company.

Mozilla Firefox 8.0 brings new features, as well as performance and stability enhancements. Here are some of the most important ones:

• Implemented Twitter search;
• Tabs can now be loaded on demand, greatly improving start-up time;
• Implemented an one-time add-on selection dialog to easily manage your installed extensions;
• HTML5 context menus support;
• Better memory performance;
• Third party add-on are now disabled by default;
• insertAdjacentHTML support;
• Better CSS hyphen support;
• Better WebSocket support;
• CORS support.

Mozilla Firefox 8.0 is supported on both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, which means that it will run on any Linux distribution.

Canonical will also update their supported Ubuntu releases to Firefox 8 via the official channels, just update your systems in a few days.

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.

Download Firefox 8 for Linux via link below:
Mozilla Firefox 8 Final [tar.bz2] 32-bit
Mozilla Firefox 8 Final [tar.bz2] 64-bit

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