There is no denying Mozilla’s contribution behind open source browser and overall web development. Its Firefox was the first major rival of IE that gave Microsoft reasons to upgrade its aging web browser. However, after arrival of Google Chrome, Mozilla has been facing some competition in keeping users hooked to Firefox, its widely popular free browser.

Taking a leaf from Google’s book, Mozilla has resorted to a faster upgrade cycle for Firefox. There has been mixed reactions to its decision to adopt a six-week upgrade cycle in the web development sector. However, latest iterations of Firefox have proved to be faster, feature rich and they have put a smile on faces of web programming veterans. Firefox 7 in particular, has drawn rave reviews for its excellent memory handling features and developer centric tools.

Even before developers and users can fully explore version 7 of Firefox, Mozilla has unleashed a beta of Firefox version 8. It does come with some new features, but they cannot be called ‘remarkable’. For a website development company relying on Firefox for app testing and development, version 8, however, looks promising.

With version 8, Mozilla aims to address an age old grudge of users – users upgrading to new version of Firefox had compatibility problems with add-ons meant for earlier version. To resolve this long standing issue, Firefox 8 notifies users of add-ons that are currently installed on first run and also offers them provisions to disable and remove unwanted ones. They can also re-enable add-ons that were disabled earlier. It can be done through a dialog box that is pretty intuitive.

USP of Firefox 8 is Twitter search integration. This works quite well and brings good results for integrated searches. Of course, users can change default search engine to Bing or Google if they like. This version of Firefox also features an animated visible tab action that occurs when a user reorders tabs. This is something Chrome users are familiar with already and helps those users who work with lots of tabs opened simultaneously.

Firefox 8 beta is available for Mac and Linux OS, along with Windows. This version is equipped with cross-origin resource sharing, which is recommended by W3C. This enables cross-site sharing without compromising user security. Similar to earlier versions of Firefox, version 8 beta also contains some under-the-hood feature upgrades that may remain elusive to casual users. Those developers, who are excited about HTML 5, will be happy to know that Firefox 8 comes with HTML 5 context menu support.

Firefox 8 Beta offers users an option to manage tabs at start-up efficiently. They can choose to resume browsing from where they had left, but Firefox would not load tabs at all if users deselect this option. This feature is ideal for users who are stuck with sluggish internet connections.

It is not known exactly when Mozilla will release stable version of this browser. However, given its speedy upgrade cycle, it can be assumed that Firefox 8 full version will hit the web next month.