New Labour is in the dustbin of history - David Starkey
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Mozilla releases Firefox 8 and Thunderbird 8
OPEN SOURCE OUTFIT Mozilla released Firefox 8 earlier today.
Mozilla's rapid-release schedule meant that Firefox 8 was out the door just six weeks after Firefox 7 hit the download mirrors. The latest version of the popular web browser adds Twitter search and improvements to WebGL, among other additions and improvements.
Mozilla has made general improvements and bug fixes in Firefox 8 but this release focuses on WebGL, a standard that offers hardware-accelerated 3D graphics without the need for plug-ins. Firefox 8 has support for cross-origin resource sharing, effectively allowing developers to securely load textures from multiple domains, which is a pretty important feature for cheap and easy load balancing.
As is standard practice, Mozilla also released Firefox 8 for Android and Thunderbird 8 at the same time. The latest Firefox for Android has Master Password, which stores usernames and passwords and should, in theory, keep those details safe even if your Android device is lost or stolen.
Mozilla's Thunderbird 8 messaging client now runs on the Gecko 8 engine and primarily fixes security vulnerabilities, disables add-ons that were installed by third party programs by default and makes changes to attachment processing. The Enigmail PGP security add-on has not been updated to be compatible with Thunderbird 8 yet, however, so those who use Enigmail might want to wait awhile before upgrading Thunderbird.
Firefox 8 is likely to be the last Firefox release of 2011, marking a hectic year for Mozilla. The outfit's rapid-release schedule has been criticised by some corporate users, but there's no doubt that the quick-fire releases do bring forward features that might have waited months for a major release.
Firefox 8 and Thunderbird 8 are available for download now while Firefox 8 for Android is on the Android Market. µ
Tags: Software
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I waited until Enigmail 1.3.3 was available automatically before upgrading to TB 8, but when it "upgraded" automatically Enigmail was essentially broken. I saw warnings about registration issues in the Error Console, and although there seem to be some commands available, I can't decrypt an attachment without saving it manually and decrypting it at the command line, which I can just as easily do without installing Enigmail.
Count me as voting against this avalanch of releases.
This is so ridiculous. The "new versions" have such little additional functionality it's an embarrassment.
Maybe they are trying to pump their version up to show they've been around for a while and they are progressing "faster" than anyone else.
We have a policy of testing against every browser version, but now we are just giving up on FireFox... We'll test every 100th version or so - maybe there will be some major changes by then.
I run both the release and aurora updates and I haven't had issues with either. The browser is much faster now and has great memory management. Considering the Mozilla only moved to the rapid release cycle recently, I think they should be proud of how it is going.
The update frenzy for Firefox appears to have gone too fast. My installation of version 7.0.1 is instable with freezing for 20-30 sec or more and the browser is often unresponsive. After googling it seems that a lot of people have the same problem. This has lead me to Opera in stead, which seems more rapid and stable.
V1.3.3 has been done, and is on the enigmail site, and is compatible with thunderbird 8. You just have to install it manually since Mozilla hasn't gotten around to approving it yet.
Download the file, and then install add-on from file, and all sorted.