Ubuntu and Android Users Should Jump On New Firefox Updates

If you're a Firefox fan and you happen to be in the middle of a long Thanksgiving weekend, you can take advantage of some new updates. In February of this year, Mozilla announced its shift to a new, rapid release cycle, and the company has stuck to the plan. You can now get Firefox 8, which Mozilla has made very clear is a major upgrade of the browser. Also, all Ubuntu 11.10 users can now upgrade their default browsers to Firefox 8 (by running the Software Update app through Settings), and Firefox for Android is out in an early version with its new native user interface instead of the previous XUL-based version.

Among many new features, Firefox 8 lets you do Twitter searches directly from your toolbar. Firefox 8 also works more efficiently with tabs, and facility with tabs is one reason that many people favor Firefox.   But the biggest reason to upgrade is probably increased performance.

Meanwhile, as we've reported, Firefox for Android is a mobile browser to be taken seriously.  As explained in this post:

"Quite simply everything you see is a native Android widget. Even the web content is displayed in a native view, very similar to the multi-process layers system we previously used. This allows us to asynchronously pan and zoom the web content, without waiting for the browser to scroll or zoom the actual content. Even though the UI is completely implemented in native widgets, there is still a lot of JavaScript around, it’s just not visible. JavaScript is the perfect binding language into the Gecko platform and we are still using it for many of the same tasks."

The new native user interface also uses much less memory than the previous version, and resolves some performance and latency problems.

Finally, Ubuntu 11.10 users can very easily upgrade to Firefox 8, but if you happen to be using an older version, you have the option as well. Users of older versions can follow this tutorial to do so.