San Francisco — With the ever growing social-networking activities on the rises, Mozilla, in keeping with its rapid release cycle, on Tuesday updated its popular web browser to Firefox 8, with one distinctive feature that is sure to get notice by social media fans — built-in Twitter search.
Since Mozilla embarked on its every-six-week upgrade cycle last summer, each new Firefox has had relatively few visible changes. The newly released Firefox is now leveraging all of that Twitter content you have been so eager to recapture.
Keeping the temptations of messaging fans, Firefox 8’s most impressive addition was Twitter as a choice in Firefox’s search bar, letting users look up topics, hashtags and usernames on the micro-blogging service. Twitter search is currently available only in the English, Japanese, Portuguese and Slovenian editions of Firefox, and Mozilla is promising more languages to be added in the future.
“Twitter is now directly incorporated as a search option in Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux,” Mozilla said in a blog post Tuesday detailing updates found in Firefox 8, many of which are under the hood.
Hence, with the update, Twitter joins Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon.com, eBay and Wikipedia as search options incorporated into Firefox.
Firefox 8 adds Twitter as a search choice.
In addition to incorporating Twitter search, other changes and enhancements to Firefox 8 consists of on-demand tab loading at startup, also Mozilla promises that Firefox 8 will be faster than its earlier versions with improved support for HTML5. Other features include improved WebGL support, and WebGL, “a new Web standard that allows websites and Web apps to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without third-party software,” something Mozilla is awfully proud of:
Mozilla pioneered WebGL and introduced it in Firefox earlier this year. WebGL is a new Web standard that allows websites and Web apps to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without third-party software. Firefox adds support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which lets developers load WebGL textures from other domains in a secure way.
Mozilla also kept to its promise last August to automatically immobilized add-ons installed without user approval. Behind-the-back add-ons have cropped up at times, most recently in January when one bundled with Skype caused so many browser crashes that Mozilla blacklisted it. When users start Firefox 8, all add-ons that have been surreptitiously installed are turned off by default.
This latest version arrives less than six weeks after Firefox 7, and applies to the desktop editions of Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the mobile Firefox for Android.
Also, the Android version of Firefox adds a Master Password capability to protect all the logins you use on your device. According to the Mozilla blog, “This will help your private info stay private if you ever share or lose your Android device.” The update also lets Android users create icons that open to specified Web sites.
To get the new version, you can either head to firefox.com or select Help> About Firefox from the Firefox menu on an earlier version. This will check for the new version and update upon restart of the browser.
The next version of Firefox is currently scheduled for release Dec. 20.