A pochi giorni dal rilascio dell'ultima versione stabile di Firefox (Firefox 7) ecco arrivare, da parte del team di Mozilla la prima beta di Firefox 8.
Firefox 8 Beta è stato infatti quest'oggi rilasciato e tramite un comunicato ufficiale il team di Mozilla ci annuncia le gustose novità:

  • Twitter Search: Firefox Beta adds Twitter as a default search option to make searching #hashtags and @usernames easier. (Currently available in English, Portuguese and Slovenian. More languages will be added in future releases.)
  • Restore tabs on demand: Users can choose to load tabs only when selected, resulting in faster start-up times when windows with lots of tabs are restored. Windows users can find this option in the Firefox Menu, under Options, on the General tab. Mac users can find this option in the Firefox Menu, under Preferences, in the General tab.
  • Enhanced control of add-ons: Users will receive a one-time notification to review and confirm third party add-ons they want to keep, disable or delete. When Firefox starts and finds that a third-party program has installed an add-on, Firefox will disable the add-on until the user has explicitly opted in, giving users better control over their Web experience.
  • Tab animations: Firefox makes it easier to re-order and tear off tabs with animated tab movement.
  • CORS for WebGL textures: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) enables Web developers to load textures from other domains for WebGL in a secure way.
  • WebSockets updates: Firefox now prevents the use of plaintext WebSockets when created from an SSL page, which improves security for users.
  • HTML5 Native Right Click Menu: Web developers can now add items directly to the Firefox right click menu using simple HTML5 markup.
  • HTML5 media elements: Developers can add a lot of video and audio elements to a website without impacting performance
  • Read more about Firefox features for Web developers here.
New in Firefox Beta for Android:
  • Twitter Search: Firefox Beta adds Twitter as a default search option to make searching #hashtags and @usernames easier. (Currently available in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Czech, Russian, Danish, Suomi, and Norwegian. More languages will be added in future releases.)
  • Master Password Support: This feature uses one master password to help users encrypt saved usernames and passwords for increased security.
  • Home Screen Bookmarks: Users can add any bookmarked website to their Android Home Screen and launch it with one click.
Firefox 8 Beta è disponibile per Windows, Mac e Linux a questo indirizzo. La versione per Android è scaricabile qui.