 "Firefox 8 final, Firefox 9 beta scheduled release in early November")
Mozilla’s rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser and some of their products is on full swing. Firefox 7 was launched back in late September and the next iteration, Firefox 8 will launch on the 8th of November, just a couple of weeks from now. As part of the development process, Firefox 9 will go into beta. Along with a whole bunch of fixes and changes, one of the new things to look forward to is something called MapGL . It’s a feature added to Google Maps that uses GPUs to accelerate performance of Google Maps on systems that support it. A Twitter search tool has also been implemented in Firefox 8. For the sake of security, addons installed by third-party software are disabled by default.
Firefox 10 will hit the Aurora build in early November as well
Users can look forward to a user interface overhaul in the Firefox 9 build as well as a big performance boost thanks to some tweaks made to the Javascript engine. Firefox 8 is currently as a beta download on the Firefox release channel page. Firefox 9, which is currently available as an alpha build, is available on the Aurora channel. Both Aurora and Beta builds are available for download for Windows, Linux, Mac as well as mobile devices.
Our resident Hardware Ninja, Rossi, lives for speed - by uhh riding his bicycle. He's Tech2's utility man, dividing his time between cameras, software and intense bouts of Quake III. He's also a fan of all things obscure, case in point, Live for Speed (sic). Never heard of it? We rest our case. In his spare time he tries to teach our new joinees the tricks of the trade even though the blood sweat and tears, but give him a camera and all things forgotten.