Mozilla looks to speed-up Firefox’s new-tab skills
March 18, 2009 Software Review
Mozilla wants to speed up tasks in Firefox that typically start with a blank tab, i.e. searching, reading Web mail or 
navigating to a new site.
Mozilla has come up with an extension, called “New Tab”. This puts likely destinations in a column down the side of the screen. Unlike other browsers, i.e. Google Inc.’s Chrome and Apple Inc.’s Safari 4 which fill a new tab with thumbnails of the most visited sites, Mozilla’s prototype mines the database of Places, the integrated history and bookmark feature that debuted in Firefox 3.0.
The small thumbnails are moved to the side of the screen, out of the user’s direct line of sight. Some of the thumbnails sport up to five lines of content that the add-on grabs from the domain’s RSS feed then lists beside the image.
The New Tab extension was referred to as contextual elements in the upper corner. If the user has selected and copied “Market Mania” in a live tab, perhaps because he wants to search the Web using that name, and then opens a new tab, a large button is displayed that reads “Search for ‘Market Mania’” in the upper right. A single click executes that search.
· · · · · After selecting and copying a URL, the new tab shows a button that will open that address, while copying a street address displays a new tab button to map that location.
The prototype works only on the under-development builds of Firefox 3.1, which will be renamed at a later stage to Firefox 3.5.
New Tab can be downloaded from Mozilla Lab’s site, and it requires Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 or can also be downloaded from Mozilla’s site.
