Download Firefox 8 now, ahead of official release tomorrow

The official Firefox 8 download may only go up on Mozilla tomorrow, but the final release is already up on the FTP servers for download. Mozilla had adopted a rapid release cycle earlier in the year, which brings Firefox up to speed with Google’s Chrome, at least when it comes to version numbers. There have been quite a few changes to the Firefox 8 browser. For one, there’s a Twitter search integrated into the primary search bar, so you can now search for usernames and hashtags on Twitter easily. Third party add-ons in Firefox will not be enabled automatically. The user will need to confirm this action. This has been done to make the browser more secure against rogue add-ons. Apart from this, there have been some cosmetic changes to the animations while handling tags. Stability fixes have been another area of work and Mozilla has been hard at work to optimize the browser and reduce the memory footprint. 

Firefox 9 should head into beta next

If you can’t wait for a day, go ahead and download the Firefox 8 final build for your operating system here. Downloads for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available there, too. If you can wait, Mozilla should push the Firefox 8 update sometime tomorrow. If doesn’t take place for some reason, click on Help > About to force the update.

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