Mozilla unveils "cognitive shield" new tab concept for Firefox
But Mozilla doesn't just want to give you quick access to the sites you visit most. The team also wants to make sure the new tab area isn't too distracting. And that's led to a completely new concept that the developers are calling a "cognitive shield."
What happens is that Firefox will keep track of your recently and frequently visited pages. But instead of showing you a list of links or thumbnails every time you open a new tab, Firefox will show you a dull gray set of icons for those pages. If you type an address or search term into the location bar, you'll never see anything other than this unremarkable list of icons. But if you scroll your mouse over the page it will expand into a colorful list of web sites and favicons.
Unlike Opera's speed dial, the Firefox bookmarks are automatically generated. But unlike Google Chrome's thumbnails, you can add or remove links from the Firefox new tab page. You can also disable this behavior by clicking the asterisk in the bottom left corner of the screen.
In order to try out this concept design, you'll need to have the most recent beta version of Firefox 3.1 and then you can download and install the New Tab prototype add-on. Eventually this feature or one very much like it could find its way into a future version of Firefox.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tom said 7:10PM on 3-23-2009
I don't want to be negative because I love FireFox, but it sounds like more memory drain. These features are great and I have found that I can't live without the add-ons, but I want the browser to be more nimble.
And I like displaying the most visited sites a la Chrome.
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Duncan said 8:23PM on 3-23-2009
This just seems like change for the sake of it, for me it would just be an irritation and as Tom said, a memory drain.
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sniping_dreamer said 8:31PM on 3-23-2009
I've been doing this with Speed Dial Extension, combined with Tab Mix Plus. Just drag the Speed Dial tab to the Home page. Then set Tab Mix Plus to "Load Home Page" on new tabs. Voila.
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DeoWulf said 10:29PM on 3-23-2009
Although I can add and remove sites, it never saves it for the next time I open a tab. Dunno what the problem is.
Anyways, I like it, although before reading this I didn't see what the point of the rollover was.
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dfgdfgdfg said 8:13AM on 3-24-2009
I love my about:blank.
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scape said 9:12AM on 3-24-2009
I can't get my head around why more people don't use Opera to begin with...
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Crazy Serb said 11:01AM on 3-24-2009
And I can't get my head around the fact that Mozilla developers are focusing on all these gizmos and fancy addons to the browser, instead of focusing on trimming off all the unnecessary memory draining features just so I don't have to restart the new 3.1 (or 3.5) every hour or two because it becomes too much of a drain on system resources on certain machines after a while...
Haven't they heard of that good ol' saying "Less is more..."?
I'd give up all those fancy features for an option to turn them all off and run Firefox in some "Slim" mode or something, under the same system resources required to run Chrome.
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MK said 8:12AM on 3-25-2009
I have always wish Opera could generate speed dial based on frequently accessed page, and Chrome to allow add/delete. But if Firefox keeps crashing on me, I guess I'll stick with Opera and Chrome =)
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shelly said 7:41AM on 3-31-2009
I like my newtabking firefox extension when it comes to bringing me my most used sites when I ctrl+T. I wish it could be strongly tied to FF itself
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