Firefox 8 has been released for the very first time to developers via the Mozilla nightly website, and tests are showing that its 20% faster than the current version Firefox 5 in almost every metric: start up, session restore, first paint, JavaScript execution, and even 2D canvas and 3D WebGL rendering. The memory footprint of Firefox 7 (and thus 8) has also been drastically reduced, along with much-needed improvements to garbage collection.

These speed improvements make Firefox 8 as fast or faster than the latest Dev Channel build of Chrome 14.

In case you missed the news, Firefox has gone to a rapid release schedule. Although the current version is 5, Firefox 6 is currently in Beta and will be the next stable build -- and six weeks after that, Firefox 7 will follow.

You can download and test Firefox 8 by visiting http://nightly.mozilla.org/ but be warned, this build is not stable and is for testing purposes only!