Firefox "New Tab" Extension Bypasses the Blank Page
by Lisa Hoover - Mar. 12, 2009Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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I love the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox so much that it's not uncommon for me to have upwards of 20 open at a time. Unfortunately, several of them are often blank pages because I've forgotten where I was planning to go once I open them.
I've always wished that Firefox would intuitively know that if I highlight an address on a Web page and open a new tab, it's probably because I want to map it. Apparently, I'm not the only one longing for that feature. Mozilla is developing an extension that takes its best guesses about why you've opened a new tab in your Firefox browser.
I've been playing with the New Tab prototype for a couple of days and think once it's ready for prime time, it will be one of my favorite Firefox add-ons. Once installed, simply highlight the content on a Web page and open a new tab in your usual way (keyboard shortcut, clicking the new tab icon, etc) and the new tab will display thumbnail images of pages you've previously opened.
Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, told Computerworld that unlike other browsers that serve up thumbnails of most frequently visited sites, "We put up the sites that people most often visit after they open a new tab." To do so, the add-on culls information from bookmarks, history, and the Places database.
The new tab also displays two contextual search options: "Search For" and "Map." The Google Search or Google Maps page appears according to your selection, with the search fields conveniently populated from the contents of your clipboard. Unfortunately, if you haven't highlighted any Web page content prior to opening a new tab, the leftover content of whatever you last copied to your clipboard will be used instead.
Mozilla admits the add-on still needs work. "This is a rough-cut prototype: the page loads too slowly, the visual design isn’t right, and you can’t even tell the browser that you don’t want a particular site to show up on the new-tab screen." Developers are encouraging the Firefox user community to download New Tab and provide feedback to the team. To run it, you'll need the latest development build.
In the grand scheme of a browser's user interface, the options afforded by the New Tab Page extension may not seem like a big deal. If you spend the majority of your day on the Internet, however, anything that helps shave time off actions you perform dozens of times per day is well worth having.
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