Firefox/Projects/About:newtab

Overview

Drivers: Dan Mills (thunder), Aza Razkin (aza), Edward Lee (Mardak)
Get involved: by hopping onto #labs on irc.mozilla.org or clicking on Discussion and leaving your comments

Description

Instead of a blank page, the new tab page should present useful task-centric navigation options based on the user's history.

Goals / Use Cases

• be perceptibly as fast as about:blank to load
• allow user to re-open previously closed tabs
• offer navigation targets that are likely to be of use to the user
• do not break the user's mental "flow" or otherwise interrupt a user task

Non Goals

• act as a content aggregator for "new" material

Download

• Install the latest Firefox 3.1 beta (required)
• Install the latest about:tab extension (sources on mercurial)

Version History

v0.0.13

• update min firefox version to 3.1
• adjust layout of actions
• better style feed links

v0.0.12

• show 5 feed items for sites next to their thumbnails

v0.0.11

• adjust layout to have thumbnails on the right side
• show just one undo close tab option at the top/left

v0.0.10

• cache site listing to improve performance of opening a new tab

v0.0.9

• add icon for new tab page
• handle ctrl/shift clicks and middle clicks

v0.0.8

• cache thumbnail images instead of reloading every time

v0.0.7

• show thumbnails of the sites and adjust layout

v0.0.6

• switch to frecency instead of visit count
• allow multiple clipboard detectors

v0.0.1 - v.0.0.5

• provide links to commonly visited pages along the bottom of the page
• put links to recently closed tabs along the side of the page
• if there is content in the clipboard, provide a button to search for that content in the upper left of the page