Oh, I see now that I’m down at the bottom that there’s a pile of us “leave-us-aloner”s!

Software design lesson one – never assume that all your users work the way you think is best!

Software design lesson two – always offer a way to configure the software back to the old version!

Removing the close tab function where only one tab is opened is a mistake. If one has “Show my windows and tabs from last time” set, closing Firefox ensures that the next time you start it you get the last tab loaded even though you may not have wanted to see it again. The right behavior is to allow closing the last tab and the browser separately as it happened in the previous versions. This has the added benefit of closing the last tab to get a fresh tab if you are done with the current content and would like all the flash, etc. to be unloaded.

Closing the browser when trying to close the last tab is equally annoying. It is equivalent to closing the browser with the last tab still showing content. For a discussion of why Firefox should revert to the previous tab behavior see above.

I have a request for your new “New Tab” page.
I like the new one but PLEASE add the following feature:
As a user, I want an integrated ToDo list in my homepage. I want to be able to edit this ToDo list using simple tags or keyword, such as “Trip to Cuba”, ot “Check Bank account”.
This way, every time I open a tab I will get reminded to do one of those tasks!
At the moment, most “New Tab” pages include suggestions for website that you frequently visit. Thus, I find myself opening a new tab to complete a task but instead I wander off and visit one of my favorite websites. Good for fun, but not productive.

I believe that this is something that many users will find useful.

Regards,
Argyrios
often find myself opening a new tab to search for a specific thing or do a specific task, but instead I

give me a blank new tab. I dont want the world to know what I was browsing in private when I open a new tab (that shows my previos closed pages and searches) in public.

Will we be able to switch it off? UI sugar, I say.

It used to work (partly) – the version 0.34 shows a blank page for me.
Any idea about how to change that?

Nice add-on. GJ Mozilla team.
I’d like about:tab to remember the tabs settings (their position and do not show deleted ones)
About the design, I think really pretty the circle presentation. Why not keeping the thumbs into the circle and showing inside the circle more detail about the thumb ?

not too bad! now, if only we could get that “open link in a new window” (right click on link with mouse) away or atleast “in a new tab” on top like google chrome.

One question – what is purpose of switching to thumbs? Because for me it looks like only for fun…But maybe there is something behind that.

could you make the bookmark toolbar show on the about:tab page. similar to what google chrome does.

When I open a new tab, I normally intend to type a URI. Sometimes, I use a keyword search, so I might type the keyword and then paste some text, but usually, I don’t paste text to the awesome bar. Consequently, I don’t expect to make use of the dynamic selection-based actions as proposed from a new tab created with Ctrl-T.

After selecting text, the obvious thing to do is use the context menu. If the context menu were smart enough and arranged well enough, it should provide much of what I want directly. A large context menu is worse than none as one spends an inordinate amount of time searching for the desired command. The context menu — at least one not augmented by add-ons — should be succinct and meaningful. The context menu should be customizable to permit users to reorder, add, or eliminate entries on-the-fly. (By that I mean that there can be an editor accessible from, say, the Options dialog that permits adjusting the various context menus, but that editor should be accessible from the context menu itself.) That way, a user can change the context menu the instant the fancy strikes to change it.

One of the options to include in the context menu, then, is the proposed dashboard tab. Thus, if the context menu doesn’t offer, with a relatively small number of pertinent choices, the action desired, the dashboard tab is sure to offer it. In that case, all of the suggested functionality related to the selection has bearing.

A new tab can reasonably contain the thumbnails and ability to search history, bookmarks, etc. as discussed herein, but ought not to react to the selection. If that dashboard tab is selected from the context menu after selecting text on a page, then the dashboard tab can include selection-specific content. As for reacting to the clipboard, that should be on demand from a context menu item or the Edit menu rather than automatic on opening a new tab. The suggestion to replace the current tab’s contents with the dashboard tab, rather than requiring a new tab to access it, completes the picture nicely (View | Dashboard?).

Thanks amau, I have been struggling for a week to get this and Tab Mix Plus working nicely together.

Latest version have bug with encodings in feed. Previus version show utf-8 encoded cyrilic feeds normal – latest use wrong encoding.

The new tab shows excerpts for some pages from the history (recently
updated pages? Or what?)

Charset handling for these excerpts seems to be broken.

E.g., I have this entry:

9. heise online
edit
done
* Configure feeds!
* Zypries stemmt sich gegen Vertrag zu Kinderporno-Sperren
* Europäischer Vermessungssatellit soll morgen starten
* Ausblick auf OpenOffice 3.1

Wow. Almost every single suggestion/criticism I’ve made so far has already been addressed. I’m really impressed, not to say very pleased! 🙂

Continuing on my nit-picking, I really miss the URLs appearing on the status bar, particularly for feed links. Also, I see encoding problems on the Google Reader feed. The feed seems to be fully valid UTF-8, yet the New Tab page interprets it as ISO-8859-1. Firefox’s standard feed preview shows it perfectly.

The new version 0.0.27 have problem with cyrillic texts like this http://img19.imageshack.us/my.php?image=newtab.jpg in previous version all was cool.

To be honest, I open a new tab (that is, CTRL-T) most often to fast-scroll to the end of my tab list (I’ve worked out a system for the fastest way to scroll through a long list of open tabs: CTRL-T to get to the end, then use the pulldown list on the right to go back to the beginning, and it’s become habit. Sorry. Usability tangent).

Anyway, I really like the new look. Here’s what struck me from the image:

1. This is the major one: no pulldown list in the search field. The engines listed in the upper right *absolutely* need to be there, otherwise you kill much of the gain you expect to get from fast searching. If we, say, copy something a proper noun from a website and want to search Wikipedia or a search engine other than Google, the old way of 1. open new tab 2. paste in upper right 3. hit enter will still be the fastest route. (Not to mention you’ll introduce an annoying inconsistency in having two search fields that work in different ways. From a user’s perspective: “I can search amazon for my text *there*! Why can’t I search amazon for my text *here*? They’re both search!”)

2. Don’t go grayscale on the thumbnails. Color is a quick-identifier for websites (along with favicons, +1 for the person who mentioned that). You’ll know a website faster by looking at its color scheme than reading the text on the left.

3. I love the automatic-copying of text idea. The browser should check if all the text in the clipboard is a valid url template, and if so slap a big “BROWSE TO _____ ” button at the top. (Disclosure: my second-most frequent use for CTRL-T is to open a new new window to browse to a copied URL. That’s got to be such a common and–or at least obvious–task, though; is it just not shown in the screenshot?)

When I open a new tab, I normally intend to type a URI. Sometimes, I use a keyword search, so I might type the keyword and then paste some text, but usually, I don’t paste text to the awesome bar. Consequently, I don’t expect to make use of the dynamic clipboard contents-based actions as proposed from a new tab created with Ctrl-T.

After selecting text, the obvious thing to do is use the context menu. If the context menu were smart enough and arranged well enough, it should provide much of what I want directly. However, a large context menu is worse than none as one spends an inordinate amount of time searching for the desired command. This concept is better in that situation because it allows arranging the information better.

I propose that the context menu — at least one not augmented by add-ons — should be succinct and meaningful. The context menu should be customizable to permit users to reorder, add, or eliminate entries on-the-fly. (By that I mean that there can be an editor accessible from, say, the Options dialog that permits adjusting the various context menus, but that editor should be accessible from the context menu itself.) That way, a user can change the context menu the instant the fancy strikes to change it. One of the options to include in the context menu, then, is the proposed dashboard/speed-dial tab. Thus, if the context menu doesn’t offer, with a relatively small number of pertinent choices, the action desired, the dashboard tab is sure to offer it. In that case, all of the suggested functionality related to the selection has bearing.

Thus, a new tab can reasonably contain the thumbnails and ability to search history, bookmarks, etc. as discussed herein, but ought not to react to the selection. If that dashboard tab is selected from the context menu after selecting text on a page, then the dashboard tab can include selection-specific content. The clipboard contents are a separate matter. Since I imagine myself making much more use of the context menu for a selection than directing the browser from the clipboard’s contents, I suggest that examining the clipboard be a user-directed feature.

I liked the suggestion of allowing the user to replace the current tab’s contents with the dashboard tab, rather than requiring a new tab to access it (from http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-31-new-tab-spec).

I guess I’m saying that the dashboard tab should be something separate from new tabs. That makes the functionality accessible to those that like blank new tabs or want their home page on new tabs. It also makes it accessible as an overlay or replacement on the current tab without the need to create a new tab and then close the current tab. Then, examining the selection only occurs when invoking the dashboard tab from the selection and examining the clipboard only occurs when directed. (There may be users that want the clipboard considered every time, so there might be an option to enable that.)

@TokyoJerry

Try Tab Mix Plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122

It gives you a little down-arrow button on the tab bar that shows all tabs by title.

The right aligned text is a terrible idea. Either left align it along an imaginary vertical line, as previously suggested, or move it to the right of the thumbnails and left align it.

I updated today from 0.18 (I think) to 0.21 or whatever this is (I forget), and the wonderful about:tab is now completely broken! You had it right with the smaller thumbnails down the right side with the RSS feeds… this new design with either the text list or the 4 large left-aligned thumbnails is uglier, slower, and … wacker.

My biggest problem though, a MUST FIX NOW problem: Now when I create a new tab, “chrome://abouttab/content/tab.html” sits in the location bar with the cursor at the end of it, messing up whatever I was about to type in the AwesomeBar.

I’m about to uninstall this, you guys can let me know when you get it fixed.

Hi,
I like the new tab concept.
The only thing is that I often target the awesome bar and I am to lazy to delete that chrome:// stuff
Therefore it would be nice if there would be an option to have the awesome bar focussed and empty or at least the adress selected so its possible to overwrite it quickly.

Is there a way to have the thumbnail version on the right?
Thanks
C.

Another update. 🙂
This time almost everything looks better and by that I mean more readable. 😉
Only two major things:
1. Undo button has black font which is quite invisible on dark background. Change color of this font to something brighter.
2. It would be great if I could specify somehow number of “Frequently Visited Sites” because right now I get 10 but I have space for 3-5 more. And I’m pretty sure with bigger resolution I get even more space.

Also I liked the whole idea of thumbs so I miss them a little. 😉

I’m still looking forward to another updates because in my opinion About:Tab has great potential, especially with features that I red on some blog. 😉

Perfect I love It

[quote]Another feature which would be nice is the ability to middle click on one of the links to open it in a new background tab.

Often there are more than 1 site in the list which I would like to open[/quote]

+1

Most wanted feature

While I think this is a neat idea, it is not everyone’s ideal; the first thing I thought when reading “The only thing you are guaranteed to not want is a blank page” was “actually, that’s exactly what I want when I open a new tab”. If I want to search, I use Ctrl-K to put the cursor in the search box. If I want to type in a URL or quicksearch thing like “wiki firefox”, I use Ctrl-L to go to the Awesome Bar. (Or, of course, I can use the mouse to do either of these things.)

That’s all just a matter of preference. Then there’s privacy. Along with various previous posters, I have serious concerns about a new tab opening with all kinds of information about where I’ve been and where I’m going and the like.

Aza Raskin responds to Jesse Ruderman’s post: “@Jesse: Not in the current prototype is the ability to remove a site or rss from new tab page. That will keep your messages safe.” So I’ll have to consider, every time I visit or browse away from a site, or close a tab, whether or not I might want that to show up on the next new tab I open?

My absolute least favorite thing about Chrome, which has some cleverness to it, was new-tab pages that opened up with my history on them. Lots of people work in cube farms, or use public computers in libraries, or are in other situations with little or no control over who walks past and looks over their shoulder. As Jesse Ruderman posted, “…people looking over my shoulder don’t need to know what I just closed.” Or what I just visited.

I haven’t tried this yet, and I expect I’ll probably love it when using it on my home machine, but it sounds like a nightmare for work and other public situations. Based on “The only thing you are guaranteed to not want is a blank page”, I assume this will likely be popular enough to become default new-tab behavior. If that happens, I think users ought to be given a choice on install whether they want tabs to open in the traditional-style or in this ‘new’, ‘enhanced’, whatever-style.

Actually, I use the Tab Mix Plus AddOn, so that my new pages are never blank but always my start page. As my start page is on igoogle, I always have the personalized info I need on my start page.

I confirm problem with Tab Mix Plus.

And I think that “Shortcuts” box in “New Tab King” addon is very interesting and usefull idea.

Another feature which would be nice is the ability to middle click on one of the links to open it in a new background tab.

Often there are more than 1 site in the list which I would like to open

I think it is great this subject is being examined because getting a blank page when clicking on a new tab just isn’t logical. However, I do not believe a new method should get over complicated and it should permit user customization. That is what Firefox is all about.

I suggest what I currently use in FF v3.0.7. I have it set up so that when I double click on the tabs bar I get my TidyFavorites page. It works identically if I use the new tab or use the double click method.

I respectfully suggest this because the TidyFavorites page, similar to Fast Dial but better IMHO, you get a page that contains bookmarks and a search panel. It gives me access to my favorites or I can initiate a search from the search panel. I quickly get to web sites, RSS feeds or search one of the multiple search engines I have in the search panel. True the freeware version only give you three options in the search panel and if you want a bunch of them like me you have to buy the PRO version, but having three customizable search possibilities and in my cash almost 400 bookmarks quickly available to me is very convenient.

No I do not work for TidyFavorites, I am just a loyal user and sincerely use the heck of the program. It is still categorized as “Experiment” on Firefox Addons site, but the program has been out and in use by thousands for a long time.

Just an honest and sincere suggestion because regardless of what is done with this new approach I will mostly likely retain my current method because of convenience. 🙂

Finally a full page!
I think that this feature is very useful but something should be changed.
Case 1 – Contextual Actions
When we surf the web, we encontered many types of content that we would like to learn:
an unknown word to define, something to translate, something to search for on Google, on Wikipedia or on a specific site (such as a movie). In these cases, for now, we have 3 options: run a command on ubiquity, go to Google and search for what interests us, or use the awesome bar to make a search for keywords. I think that it’s more useful if the awesome bar is integrated into the new-tab page so that typing a command of ubiquity (logically when this project will be integrated into the bar) or a keyword to decide how to search.
Case 2 – Quick-access bar
Sometimes I can be interested in a specific site and I can visit it 20 times in one day but I can no longer be tomorrow! Also, when I open a new tab I might want to visit a bookmarked site, or History one, or read the feed. Finally, the logic of prefer-sites can be very confusing for users that, every time they open a new tab, they may find something different. I think the Quick-access bar could be improved by removing the prefer-sites and adding instead thumbnails grouped by category.
For example. The first thumbnail could be a stack of feed subscribed sites. In this way, a Click on the stack expands and shows me all the sites in which i’m inscribed and any new titles for posts. For clarity, you can see this image http://www.flickr.com/photos/33718587@N03/3345985513/. Could also be added to a history sites stack and one for bookmarks one. For this idea I took inspiration from this “Bookmarking & History Concept” http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/concept-series/
Perhaps this is an pharaonic idea but it’s what I’d like to find every time I open a new tab.
Sorry for my horrible English
Good work. Ciao

360 BPO Solutions is a Complete Web Design and development company offering its services in the field of Custom Web Design, Web Development, SEO Services,eCommerce Solutions and Graphic Design. 360 is a Norcress Georgia based company having there development office in Karachi Pakistan. 360 BPO Solutions have the team of expert IT people under one roof, they provide best services at affordable prices.

I don’t know if is this intended but last update .19 put thumbs on left side, add some bad looking border on rollover and add black background to “open closed tab” – this actually isn’t that bad but button for opening this tab has black font so it’s quite invisible. 😉

Is there some list of changes that this update made?

I’m liking it so far. A few comments:

– Showing only a single strip of frequent sites seems weird at first, but I must say I really like the idea of showing feeds. I’d vote on this as the best usage of feeds ever since the first batch of feed readers, because they’re *finally* usable by Joe average user.

– That said, maybe slightly bigger thumbnails and two columns on wider displays could work? By wider I’m already including 1024px.

– Ugh. Are those JPEGs? I can clearly see artifacts on certain thumbnails, mainly Reddit. Please improve their quality!

– Judging by the time it takes for the feed items to appear, I’m guessing they’re not being cached. If that’s the case, I know this is an obvious thing that you would eventually do, I’m just saying it might be better to prioritize it. If that’s not the case, why does it take so long? I’d rather have instant listing than a needless delay-plus-fade-in drawing my attention.

Hi guys, nice to see firefox evolving, I still think it’s the best browser there is. I don’t see the “search for” I guess it’s not in the new tab anymore.
So far it looks good but I have a few suggestions for the “newt tab” (sorry in advance if I missed something, and these are just personal opinions, I hope it helps): first the history of closed tabs shouldn’t just display the last tab closed but the last 10 tabs closed or something like that. Also it seems that this link to “last tab closed” appears just in the next tab you open, immediately after closing one. It should remain there no matter how many things you’ve done. (And in the history => tabs recently closed, it shouldn’t keep record of the “new tabs”, empty, that are closed)
Second,for the column of most visited websites in addition to the title there is a text that can easily go too far and this doesn’t look good. Also, we can not really customize these most visited websites. We should be able to remove some of them or to add one site that we want there. The only thing we can do so far is move by drag and drop but it doesn’t keep the new location when we close and open a new tab so this is pretty much useless.
Some redundant links shouldn’t be used. For example I have both http://www.mysite.com and mysite.com in this list….
I am not exactly sure about the positioning as well I understand this is closer to the “+” sign for new tabs, but limits the number of most visited sites.
Finally but this is just a personal taste, I am not convinced by the balck and white to color transition on mouseover, I mean it doesn’t look so good in my opinion.

thanks a lot for your work

Please make sure there is an option to have a blank page. When I open a new tab I DO NOT want to have anything on it.

Wow…. this is great, I really like it and hope you use it in the next update.

One more thing. You wrote that there shouldn’t be any config but I think this is where you’re completely wrong – for example I don’t want any text string to be placed in “search box” – last time I copied password to log somewhere and I opened new tab for this and this password was displayed in this “search box”. I think you’re understand that this is not the best idea of using my password? 😉

Hello
Great add-on although AutoDial has one advantage – there are more sites displayed and they are somehow more accurate for what I expect to get from “most visited sites”.
I’m really looking forward to see fully operational version with thumbs and rollovers but I would like to point things that should be done too:
1. When I rollover on thumb I should see what is address of site that thumb can get me to. 😉
2. There really should be some way to not only move thumbs but also remove them from list.
3. In my opinion there should be more thumbs displayed. Maybe two columns? Or one column on right and one row on bottom. I don’t think that one row that can be scroll would be good idea…but who knows? 😉

And two things:
1. The thing that do searching is not intuitive…for me at least. 😉
2. I don’t get pictures in thumbs. There was only one time when one thumb generated picture…and thats all. 🙁

This is even more awesome than the new tab page from Google Toolbar 5 beta! Great work!

Oh, by the way, what was the reason behind leaving most of the screen empty? Di you not want users to feel that it was still an empty page?

or is it so that rendering the page is faster this way?

keep up the good work!

is there a way to keep “open new tab” on the bookmarks toolbar as i had it before?

To help ensure the privacy of users, they should be able turn off this feature or they should be able to right click the Quick Access Strip icon of a site and exclude it from ever appearing in the Quick Access Strip.

Greetings. I am not really a beta tester nor have I tried this new tab concept yet (until it’s more polished). But, one feature I would like to see in the upcoming new Firefox is the ability to right-click in the current active page and see a text list of all open tab titles. After opening a number of tabs (say 15 or more) it gets difficult to discern the content of each tab. The new tabs concept expressed here in this article is also very welcome design change, but the added ability to see this list of open tabs in a right-click contextual menu display I think will also be nice to have. Also, if there are tabs open from the same page, perhaps those tabs could be listed as sub-tabs to a header tabs, similar to the hierarchical concept of nested folders… folders and sub-folders. Thanks for listening to my two-cents. 🙂

TokyoJerry

You have managed to streamline:
See Text->Select->Copy->Open tab->Go to web->Paste->Execute
To:
See text->Select->Open tab->Execute

This is good thinking, and will save the user a lot of time. But then, can we streamline this even further?
Take a look at this extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5595

With this drag and drop concept, all the user would need to do is:
See text->Select->Drag text->Drop text
You would not even need to move the cursor all the way up to the Open Tab button, because once you selected the text, you already have the cursor next to the selection.
This allows for incredibly fast execution. Hopefully you will consider this drag and drop concept.

And on another note, I love the idea of having the quick-access bar in faint greyscale when the cursor is not close. Some people mentioned opacity as alternative, actually I would like to see BOTH grey scale filtering and opacity combined to make make the page more “polite” as you put it.

Overall, these ideas are great. And the vertical quick-access bar with RSS feeds are very nice features I would love to have.

Please either don’t do this, or at least make it an option which can be disabled. (It would seem intuitive to actually have it be a set of options – “new tab is blank”, “new tab is smart-tab-interface”, “new tab is same page as old tab” (IE-style, though I don’t know why anyone would want that behaviour…), “new tab is home page”.)

Contrary to the statement in the first paragraph of the article, I *do* often want a blank page when opening a new tab. The reasons vary, but probably the simplest is as an easy means of getting a low-brightness, uncluttered screen.

I have no reason to deny this feature to those who do want it, but please, don’t force it on me.

Really not bad idea. But implement some keyboard shortcuts for this new feature, please.

I’d like to see the list of the search engines on the page, too. Or maybe just the most used ones.

Also, another vote for clipboard content-dependent actions, and for removal of RSS fetching.

Speaking of layouts, the draft shown in the “New Tab Spec” blog post seems pretty good, with most visited pages at the bottom and a separate screen for closed tabs. Is there a reason for its scrapping? Are there any plans to make it available as an option?

Great Stuff… Really Good.

Notes:
– Feels sluggish on load, probably due to fetching of thumbnails; it might be a good idea to store a previous version of the thumbnail and display it immediately and maybe reload it with a 1 second delay.

Actions:
– Search for should be more intelligent
> if it is an address, it should display a mini-map and add a link to go to full map
> if it is a single word, show the definition and an option to do a full fledged search
> if it is an email id, show an option to “Mail-to”
> if it is a chunk of text, not in the default language as the browser, show an option to translate
> if it is a URL, show an option to open it PLUS an option to convert it to TinyUrl (or auto convert to tinyurl and show that)

On search, maybe it would be a good idea to show the Top 3 results (helpful if the selection is something specific which has a wiki entry or is a celebrity)

Another option is to provide ‘Search With’ and list the search engines available in the browser.

Why doesn’t clicking the search button open into a new tab rather than replacing the current one?

David – FWIW, Groowe and most other search toolbars offer that as an option. I don’t even display Firefox’s internal Search field. It serves no purpose.

I really like the idea of having the feeds of a site beside its thumbnail, it allows me to know what’s updated in a glance, but it’s obvious that there is a lot of work needed in term of UI to make it more accessible, but good work guys.

In Mozilla we trust !

Perfect! I never liked the blank tab approach, and it had bothered me since the beginning of tabs. This way makes much more sense. Actually, anything, like opening to the home page, or the last open tab, would make more sense than the nothing option.
Thank you!

I disagree that the right edge is outside of the user’s foveal vision: once they have a few tabs open, the New Tab button appears at the far right of the strip, a mere *not-very-many* pixels above the first item.

If we *really* want to be out of the way, we should line the *bottom* of the page. We’d have more space then, too, and could neatly expand upwards for many-itemmed feeds.

And! If-&-when we do offer the option to remove a page, for how long will that apply?

Can the user restore a page to being automatically chosen-or-not, or is it forever a manual decision thenceforth? (I suppose we could have a pair of black- and white-lists, but that seems cumbersome UI-wise.)

Say the user used to visit a page frequently, but stopped doing so, so they manually removed the page from the New Tab screen. Later they start frequenting that page again, but it never reappears in the list.

I implore faith in the frecency algorithm. The Book of Mozilla tells us it is good and just. Tweak it if it’s sub-optimal; add extra factors, e.g.:

Step 1. It’s Monday at 09:30.
Step 2. I *always* visit The Register on Mondays at around 09:30.
Step 3. Include The Register if it’s Monday at around 09:30.

Step 1. It’s Saturday at 13:00.
Step 2. I always check the football league table on Saturdays after lunch.
Step 3. Include that page then.

Etc.

I *do* like Ambient News’s transient-information–density and river-of-news approach. Is there any chance of incorporating some of the most frecent *feeds* (irrespective of how unfrecent their associated *pages* are)?

Perhaps this display could update vidiprinter-style (ask a Brit who’s watched a Saturday-afternoon football results programme).

Now: opacity!

Instead of using grey for the thumbnails and text, how about lowering the opacity?

This would accommodate unusual default page colours and dark-on-light scenarios.

We could have the opacity drop even further if the user isn’t pointing anywhere near the thumbnails-‘n’-text; or even changing smoothly with the pointer’s distance-from-the-goods.

As an example, my customised blank.css for Ambient News:
.feed {padding-bottom:1em;}
ul {display:inline; padding-left:0;}
a {color:inherit; opacity:0.66666667; text-decoration:none;}
a:hover, a:focus {color:inherit; opacity:1.00 !important;}
.feed-title {display:inline;}
.feed-title a {opacity:0.33333333; font-variant:small-caps;}
.feed-entry {display:inline;}
.feed-entry a:visited {color:inherit; opacity:0.33333333;}

Opacity is your friend. It told me so.

This is pretty cool and it works extremely well. However, I am noticing a slight performance dip when restoring sessions, especially when one has many tabs open.

Also, is there anyway of removing certain sites from Places? For example: what if didn’t want ________.com loading there…

I like the extension, but I’m still having problems with it. When I tried it at work today, it displayed me one of the websites that I visit very often, which is a gaming website. But I visit that website at home, not at work, because it’s not allowed to access that website at work.

The result is that was redirected to an ‘forbidden’ webpage that explained the error, and I got an email too. The URL is also present in the ‘Most Visited’ list, but no screenshot is made from that, so it doesn’t trigger a web access.

I understand why this happens ofcourse, but it got me thinking. Maybe we should allow a website to marked (tagged ?) so that it won’t appear on the new tab page at all.

I like!

One thing I noticed is that when you open New Tab and then navigate away using the location bar or a bookmark, the New Tab stays in your history and the Back button is available. This feels weird to me, even though there’s some precedent in other browsers. I think the New Tab page should be a transient thing and not persistent in history.

I like the overall layout, and am interested in seeing the RSS feed.

Maybe future versions could include a list of selectable “widgets” like in various WordPress themes or even Dashboard-like things. Clocks, calendars and calculators. I feel like I want to interact with these elements and some canvassy tools would be fun.

It’s too slow to open a new tab with this. I need a new tab to be instantaneous. Also, my most common reason for opening a new tab is to start a search, so a search box would be good.

I’ve just discovered New Tab King : http://www.newtabking.com/

It’s a great extension but it could be better with thumbnails of most visited sites 🙂

I’m sad I missed the original posts months ago. I posted an article about how new tab might be a good place to allow users to interact with extensions.

http://overstimulate.com/articles/firefox-new-tab-addons

Installed about:tab 0.18, restarted, opened a new tab and got a blank page. When I typed about:tab in the address bar I got the new tab page.

I’m using tab mix plus and had it set to open new tabs as blank. I suspect this is overriding about:tab.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090305 Minefield/3.2a1pre – Build ID: 20090305020302

Lessee…streamlined, not distracting, instant load….

What you’re talking about is having a new tab always open a local home page where you put exactly what you want to be able to do on a new tab: key links and any key search boxes that you can’t cover with customized keyword searches in the location bar.

A page that tries to out-think you and load up thumbnails of stuff from all over the Web meets none of those criteria. No configuration?? Friends, configuration is the whole purpose of a computer.

Aza – Firstly, I am really excited about your work on the New Tab page. I have hoped for this feature in Firefox for a long time. Right now I use the Fast Dial extension, which I love. But the work you are doing and the ideas you have put forth are much more exciting and innovative to me.

Secondly, I think you should take your time on this and in true Mozilla fashion get it right before you get it done quick.

So my feedback is as follows:
-I like the idea of having the web sites positioned on the right side of the screen – that’s nice.

-You should have a bit more content on the left. Maybe integrate some more ubiquity stuff there.

-Try to get some feedback and polling data on what people do when they open a new tab. For instance if a ton of people simply open a new tab and they search for an address with Google Maps, they look at Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook – maybe have those options there ready to go.

-I don’t like the little text that pops up to the left of the websites. It’s wayy to busy.

-Make the new tab screen really clean for the final version but also add some nice typography and some big lettering. I like seeing some aesthetics. Make it Mozilla pretty.

-Keep releasing these prototypes. I love seeing what you’re coming up with. Good work.

-Matt

“People open a new tab to do a search” This is what needs to be fixed. The search box is always available in the browser UI. Why doesn’t clicking the search button open into a new tab rather than replacing the current one? This should at least be an option under the “tabs” setup area.

doesn’t work with “tab clicking options” add-on when double-clicking on the tab bar

I really think Opera’s Quick Dial is the best implementation by far as an option for new tabs. The main reason being you can use a shortcut key for each of the 9 items. Safari’s implementation is far too flashy in my opinion, and Chrome’s without short keys to my knowledge is just slightly better than useless. That may be a bit harsh, but there’s no pattern to the order of items until a prolonged period of usage isn’t there? Honestly I only used Chrome once and was disappointed with it, so maybe it’s changed since then. Anyway think I’d stick to the speed dial plugin I use for Firefox.

US URL link is dead.

I haven’t tried the New Tab, but I think the command “New Tab” should be synonymous with “open Ubiquity”, except it would show visited pages on the right (I really liked that bit).

I use FF all day, and I use keyboard shortcuts all the time. I also have Ubiquity, but I rarely use it. I’m much too used to select something, then Ctl-c, Ctl-t, Ctl-k, Ctl-v, Enter, when Ubiquity would be much faster. If Ubiquity (or something very similar) would take over at my Ctl-t, it would be a very pleasant experience, I think.

I’m convinced it would be a good idea to add favicons to the mix (at original, 16 px size).

People aren’t yet used to identify their favourite sites in the form of miniatures.

Adding the favicons close to the page titles (aligned right or left of the titles, or above) would speed up the “glance-target-click” process.

How about making everything optional and customizeable like igoogle or my.yahoo.com?

Great ideas. One thing that I would suggest is that this page be loaded any time that the address bar has its value changed by the user. Should the user change focus without actually signaling to change sites, then the original site should pop back. Maybe even keep the original site as a thumbnail on the new location page.

For instance, say I am on Google News, and I decide to check out Homestarrunner.com, assuming that I am done with Google News, I just go up to the address bad (which highlights the text), and as soon as I type h, the page changes to the new site page with all relevant pages that start with H, and continues until either I finish the address, or click on one of the links. Should I decide to cancel the action either by hitting escape, Cmd/Ctrl+Z, or clicking a “Go back” link, the original URL is returned, and the page is restored.

Looking good – felt a little sluggish the first load (albeit during a session restore) – possibly while fetching thumbnails?

I like putting things along the right hand side, as I said to beltzner, an earlier version that had them along the bottom (and on a gray background) made them feel less like part of the page, and more as a tool for navigating the white portion of the page.

Pulling the RSS data is a really sharp idea – the list looked cluttered until I figured out what it was doing – maybe a couple points larger text for the titles so they stand out more?

Having a URL in my clipboard when I opened it the first time, the button said “Search for http://…” where I would have expected “Go to http://…” or even just “http://…”. I *think* the consistent position and button styling should be enough to entice people to click, without needing to keep the “search for…” text constant – but maybe this was just a bug?

The undo close tab segment is also a good idea, but the styling (and length of the text) makes it look like a blurb, not an actionable thing and so I ignored it at first. Could we make that more obviously action-capable, maybe using the standard “undo” glyph to reinforce the text?

In my case, the recently closed tab’s title ended with a question mark, so the text scanned sort of oddly:

“Didn’t mean to close that meandering wildly » Deep Packet Inspection Considered Harmful? tab?”

Is there a way we can keep the tone, which I like, while putting more textual separation between the prompt and the page title, to prevent confusion, e.g.:

[*] Deep Packet Inspection Considered Harmful? – Did you close this tab accidentally? _Bring it back!_

Overall though, it’s nice to see some smarts emerging here. I think frecency+RSS is going to be the big win here since it has the potential to give users who have no idea what RSS is a way to nevertheless end up “subscribed” to favourite sites, which is something I think they would do if they knew they could. The search and undo close tab buttons are a very natural fit too, of course, but the frecent rss is where we can really provide meaningful content.

Also, do you think it would be profoundly ugly to have the thumbnails use rounded corners like the other boxes on the page?

Great work !

My thoughts:
The “search for ” is not a good idea. In my case the result is strange because right now I have an email in the clipboard.

It’s full of … blank 🙂 “Most visited sites” is too small and on the right! In the middle and in the bottom there is nothing!!!

In my opinion Chrome and Safari 4 have the best solution: shortcuts to most visited / preferred websites must be the feature n°1 for a new tab.

My mother is not a power user at all (last December she discovered … tabs!) but after she asks me how to display Google (the home page) when opening a new tab. It’s a kind of Top Sites restricted to the most visited.