Firefox 8 Caters to Hardcore Twitter Users (NewsFactor)

Firefox 8 officially rolls out on Tuesday, but Mozilla quietly made it available in preview mode a few days early. Mozilla offered a Firefox 8 link to its FTP servers on Saturday for PC, Mac and Linux computers.

The latest update to Firefox includes a Twitter tie-in. Users can search Twitter right from a drop-down search box built into the browser or highlight text on the screen and right-click and select "search Twitter" to find people, topics or hashtags.

"I don't think Twitter is going to be enough to get people to switch browsers," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner. "It appears that it's going to take more than that to drive people forward, but that doesn't mean that browser makers are going to stop trying."

Mobile Browser Wars

Indeed, the browser wars may not be in full swing but they aren't dead, either. The battle is taking on a mobile dimension even as browser-makers duke it out on the desktop.

Google is the aggressor, with its Chrome browser gaining ground. According to Netmarketshare, Chrome is in third place with 17.6 percent, after Microsoft's Internet Explorer with 52.6 percent and Firefox with 22.5 percent.

Chrome celebrated its third birthday in September and got one of its biggest market share boosts in October with a 1.4 percent gain in the desktop market. Chrome's gains came at the expense of IE and Firefox.

Chrome is seeing momentum at a time when some are questioning the future of Internet Explorer and the success of the Windows Phone mobile operating system. Although Netmarketshare gives IE 52.6 percent of the market, it only has about 6 percent of Web traffic. Apple Safari is making its name known in the mobile market. Safari boasts 62.1 percent of mobile-browser Web traffic.

An Incremental Update

As for the Firefox 8 release, few expected a major update. Like Chrome, Firefox is releasing a full-version-number upgrade every six weeks. Firefox 8 may actually offers a few reversals of changes to the last version.

For example, the third party add-on check is being extended to include add-ons installed directly in the application folder in the profile. Mozilla said this doesn't impact any add-ons installed through the regular add-on installation process. This is essentially a move to beef up security.

The way Firefox loads multiple tabs is different. Rather than try to load the content in every open tab when the browser restarts, Firefox now loads the tab that shows first and loads the others if and when the user switches to that tab. Firefox 8 is also supposed to be faster and offer improved support for HTML 5 and WebSocket.

"Firefox 8 feels like an incremental update," Gartenberg said. "This doesn't feel like something that's dramatically going to change the browser landscape, but it does show how people are working hard to try to change that landscape."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/linux/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20111107/bs_nf/80900

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