Mozilla has been looking at different ways to optimize the user’s experience when they open a new tab in Firefox. By default Firefox is set to display a blank page whenever a new tab is opened, and from there the user normally performs a search or navigates to one of their favorite sites. From the sounds of it they’re looking to add something much like what Opera already does with Speed Dial.
Using that idea one developer decided to create an extension called Auto Dial. It grabs information from your browser’s history to determine what your most visited sites are, and it will display them in a format similar to what you see in the screenshot above. The more popular sites are larger and listed towards the top, while the less visited sites are at the bottom and occupy less space. The number of items shown on the screen at a time will change depending on the size of your browser window.
As it stands right now Auto Dial is far from being anything fancy. The only way you can access the Auto Dial page is to visit chrome://autodial/content in Firefox, which you can then set as your homepage. If you want the page to appear whenever you create a new tab you’ll need to use an extension like Tab Mix Plus or New Tab Homepage.
I like some of the ideas Mozilla has for optimizing the new tab page, and it will be interesting to see if any of the improvements will be coming in the early part of 2009 when Firefox 3.1 is due out. Would you like to see a revamped new tab page, or are you content with the blank screen?
Get Auto Dial for Firefox
Thanks Cody!
I prefer to have a blank new tab so I can download other Websites to support an entry I’m working on. I never did like what Opera did with Speed Dial. I understand it’s a matter of preferences; other would love it.
Auto Dial and Speed Dial seem like great addons until you’ve used them for a while. They are slow, don’t refresh robustly and ignore censoring addons. CybernetNews is a great example. Set it to be one of the thumbnails and what do you see? The banner logo, links, etc. at the top of the page dominate. Try it with SnapFiles. What do you see? The banner garbage fills the entire thumbnail. The idea of thumbnail is to quickly see what is new so you can decide if you want to navigate to that site. A thumbnail filled with static “I love me” crap from the top of the home page kills the idea. One of those 2 thumbnailers (I don’t remember which, sorry) does give a nice large preview during mouseover. Auto Dial is quite intrusive, similar to the way Thumbstrips inserts itself into multiple places. Speed Dial has been broken for the past few releases and the links to the support forum are inconsistent.
This is awesome, I tell ya, the fine folk making these add-ons know what you want before you do.
I think Opera’s use of Speed Dial is a bit better than that of Firefox’s. The refresh speed isn’t even noticeable for me on Opera.
I just realized Auto Dial is NOT the addon I was remembering. My comments above are about Fast Dial. I apologize for any confusion my…congusion…may have created.
Yes, Ryan, a lot of people love the Opera Speed Dial. Maybe the speed increase of FF 3.x will make it possible. I keep trying Speed Dial and Fast Dial every few months and they still disappoint. They’ve always, “missed it by that much…”
I want that in Fx3.1! It makes sense to take advantage of the blank slate of a new tab.
There is no options or preferences of any kind. I want to see some domains but no others.
What if I don’t wanna see my porn there? What if there’s another users on my machine and they find my porn by looking at this?
Useless without preferences. When are developers going to realize that.
i do like to have a blank page as opening the sites that i’m used to visit daily isn’t that hard to remember