(Click to Enlarge)
One of the things that I absolutely love about Opera is the Speed Dial that was introduced back in Opera 9.2 almost exactly one year ago. It basically adds thumbnail images of your 9 favorite sites to the page that is displayed when you open a new tab.
Well, like most great features it didn’t take long for a Firefox extension to appear that offered a similar concept. The extension fell short in a lot of different areas, and I didn’t feel as though it stacked up very well against what Opera was offering. It turns out that there is a better one available called Fast Dial that is much much closer to Opera’s Speed Dial, and actually has some rather unique aspects to it:
- Up to 36 different sites can be added (6×6).
- Hotkeys! Just like Opera you can use hotkeys to access your first 9 sites. However, with this extension you can actually customize the hotkey that’s used in conjunction with the number.
- Specify a custom image to be used for the thumbnail. This way you can just use a site’s logo if you don’t want to actually have a screenshot.
- Customize the appearance so that it looks the way you want it to. For example, I changed the background color in the screenshot above from being white to a darker gray. You can also change the font and several other colors used in the extension.
- You can add files/images from your desktop! For example, you can add a link to a PDF or a DOC file that you frequently need to access. You’ll want to specify a custom image for the thumbnail image though because it won’t be able to generate a preview. Note: Firefox will prompt your with the open/save box assuming that the file can’t be displayed within Firefox.
- Right-click on a site or tab to quickly add it to the Fast Dial.
- Drag and drop to rearrange the different items.
The only thing that I’ve found this extension to lack is dragging and dropping bookmarks/URLS onto a blank square which I believe eases the setup process. Admittedly this extension is the closest thing I’ve seen to Opera’s Speed Dial, and it even has some aspects that I like better. From now on I don’t think I’ll be using Firefox without this extension.
Get the Fast Dial Firefox Extension
Enjoyed the post? Subscribe to our feed to get a daily dose of CyberNet!
Tags: Firefox, Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Bookmark, Firefox Extensions
Related Posts:
- Opera’s Speed Dial in Firefox…You Knew it was Coming!
- Will the Real Speed Dial Please Stand Up?
- Opera Reveals New Speed Dial Feature…I like it!
- Helpful Tip: Add More Speed Dials in Opera 9.5
- MyFive: Making Use of Opera’s Speed Dial
Has anyone tried Symbaloo.com? I now use that as my home page in Firefox, Opera, and IE, and it’s kind of like Speed Dial on steroids. You can add as many pages as you want–albeit not by drag-and-drop–and, as I alluded to, you can access it in any browser, which means that you can take your “speed dial” with you.
I’ve seen that before, and even though it does look nice I just don’t find that it makes me more productive. It takes too much thinking to figure out what I need to click, and that defeats the purpose in my opinion.
Yep, nice (i have a slight fetish for thumbnails), but pretty useless…RSS is the way to go.
This is a really great find… extremely useful, thanks!
garbage. http://www.homepagestartup.com
@Jake:
Been there. Looks good. Thanks.
Regards,
Omar.-
I agree with Jake. homepagestartup.com is garbage. It gives someone else free demographic information, the thumbnails are too small, it’s got minimal customization, etc.
speed dial has a challenge “playing well with others” and gets confused at times, refusing to actually display the thumbnails.
Fast Dial looks pretty good. Thanks.
Personally, I never understood what the big deal with speed dial is. I don’t see how it’s any better than a simple bookmark toolbar.
This looks like Symbaloo, but seems a bit easier to use (i.e. adding and changing thumbnails). The problem with Fast Dial is that it always loads thumbnails when I open a new tab, and it may not necessarily be what I want. Also, there is no way to have multiple sets of thumbnails. For example, in Symbaloo, I can define a special tab with thumbnails for sites I use at work (which are not accessible outside of the corporate Intranet) and home, I can have a group for shopping, news, etc. With Fast Dial, there is only one set, and it’s a bit limiting. It would be nice if the set of thumbnails could be customized for specific location or task.
Alex Davis, you probably didn’t see the group function for the thumbnails. That lets you define a thumbnail as a pointer to a different screen of thumbnails. Use that with the custom icon option for a thumbnail and you can have what you describe, different sets of thumbnails for different locations or tasks. You could have, for example, a custom icon that’s a photo of your workplace and enable the “group” checkbox in the properties for that thumbnail. I’ve got a 5×3 setup (widescreen monitors) in which the first 4 of each row are the most common per category and the right-most links to a page for the less-commonly used shortcuts. The thumbnails are a great way to quickly see what is updated. The earlier comment about RSS might work for some people, I’m more visually oriented so thumbnails work great. The only drawback I see to Fast Dial is the lack of scrolling in the thumbnails. SnapFiles.com has such a huge amount of static junk at the top of the page that the thumbnail is useless. Guess I’ll finally have to start using GreaseMonkey to trim the fat from SnapFiles…
Fred Thompson: Great, Fred! Indeed I did not realize this. Thank you for the hint. Now it looks very enticing.
OK, from where I stand, Faster Dial has one major problem (again, unless I missed something): its settings seem to be machine-specific. With Symbaloo, I can get my thumbnails from any system (from home, work, etc). It would be nice if Faster Dial could centralize setting so that they get accessible from multiple machines. I kind a like its functionality.
I agree. Though with opera, the bookmarks toolbar is kinda crappy (no middle clicking to open in a new tab…), and the speed dial is just like…right there, so it’s pretty effortless to set up.
Thus, I use speed dial if I’m using Opera. If I’m not using Opera, then I don’t use any of the other copy cats.
I find it to be a lot more useful to see a visual interface to my most used bookmarks. I guess it’s just a personal preference, but a lot of people who have used Speed Dial before find that they fall in love with it. It’s one of those things you just have to give a shot.
That’s something that Opera 9.5 Beta does, and I’m sure a similar feature will be available in the Firefox extension in the future. Maybe they could set it up to retrieve a specific tag from the Del.icio.us bookmarks or something.