Mozilla Meditates on the Future of the Blank Tab
You open a fresh new tab on your browser and what do you see? If a blank white screen feels like infinite potential to you, you're not alone. Mozilla feels the same way and is working on figuring out what to put in that space.
Mozilla Labs posted a new proposal today to put frequently visited page thumbnails in the very corner of new tabs and to perform contextual actions automatically, based on what you were doing on your last tab. For example, if you've highlighted a street address on one tab, Firefox might open a map of that address automatically in a new tab.
We'd like to humbly suggest that having all new tabs open to ReadWriteWeb.com would be a great way to advance our collective knowledge of the web - but we don't expect that suggestion to be acted on any time soon!
What would you like to see open automatically in new tabs?
The Proposal
The image above is what's been proposed. Aza Raskin of the New Tab design & prototype team writes that this is clearly just a proof of concept, but you can test it out now by following the instructions in his post. You can see that there's an undo option for closed tabs, a one click option to search for a highlighted term, screenshots of most-visited pages and their RSS feed headlines displayed when available. All in maddeningly light grey.
This isn't something I'd use, but maybe others will like it.
The Opera and Chrome browsers have nice big "speed dial" pages in blank tabs, though neither of those options is as hot-looking as the new Safari speed dial page!
I've tried having RSS feeds display in new tabs, but I never really looked at them. I wouldn't mind having "inspiring images" appear randomly from Flickr, for example, but that would get distracting. Friends' activity streams might not be so bad.
For now though, I think I prefer to keep my blank tabs...blank. It might be nice if they were black and not white, in fact. It's almost a spiritual thing. I'm not sure I need stuff in there, I like the infinite potential of the fresh, blank new tab.
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Personally, when I open a new tab, it's always through CMD+T, and I'm usually about to go somewhere, either through search or to type in a URL.
While the speed dial looks nice, having to reach for my mouse then select something doesn't save me any time. I can hit CMD+L or CMD+K and be in the address or search bar respectively, and typing in where I want to go faster than I can click a big image of "favorite sites."
While I know that I may be in the minority, I know that I'm not alone. If the new tab allowed me to interact with content all from within my keyboard's homerow, now we're talking.
It might be cool if each were numbered, so pressing 1 automatically took me to that speed dial. Or if the second tab was wikipedia-- it would be great if pressing "2" created a small search box within that 'speed dial' window, that would automatically search just wikipedia. I know there are ways to set this up with keywords and smart search, but sometimes, it's easier to see than remember a ton of syntax for everything. I still can't give up my keyboard though.
I'm very into the idea of contextual new tabs. If it could take what I have in my clipboard, and automatically give me large links in the new tabs, that would be awesome. For instance. What if I copied (or hightlighted) Marshall Kirkpatrick. When I open the new tab, there are buttons that will take me to the wikipedia page for him, show me his twitter account's recent tweets, etc. If I have a product or store name, I get google search results, I get reviews on Yelp, I get a link to a map. Basically, do a contextual search on what's in my clipboard, and allow me to select from the results with my keyboard. I'm hoping Ubiquity offers this someday soon, if not already. But I'm all for making it simpler, and just part of the browser by default.
i use and love the Opera speed dial page, yeah it would be nice for it to look cool and flashy, but it doesnt really need to, its just 9 of the pages i go to most often like my different email login pages, google, wikipedia, and RWW. whenever i open a new tab at work and its just blank makes me wish even more that i was back at home with my Opera speed dial!
Why not let the user decide what the new tab displays?
As ever, Opera is one step foward.
Might be a good idea but wouldn't this slow down the process of opening a new tab?
Everybody is doing something speed-dial like, but what about a widget dashboard (cached locally of course) that both links to frequently used pages AND exposes most relevant content? (e.g., gmail block can link to gmail AND show latest unread) -- start pages already do this, but I feel like this functionality would be slicker cached on the browser.
hmm, all good ideas but why not just let the addon developers create all the ideas that people might want and let personal preference rule!
How about some ads to make some money for Mozilla?
Bad ideas I guess!
How about having few options for users to choose what they want to see first for a start then decide later the final feature?
I would also stick with the 'clean slate' attitude. But having a customizing option (part of browser theme?)has a certain appeal - proud parent would put kid picture there...etc.....
Is it just me or has firefox already started doing this as of today. Every time I open a new tab now it is opening up google custom search. Its really annoying because it takes longer for new tabs to open and I would rather simply type the address in the address bar anyway.