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.

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.

Says Beltzner, the goal is to have tabs that are related grouped together. The change will be landing on the trunk shortly and then they will decide whether or not to take it to Firefox 3.1. (Please do!)

Tabs, tabs, everywhere

The tab ordering feature is one of the little things that doesn't get a lot of attention when people talk about Google Chrome. Instead, the focus is on the WebKit engine, the lightweight feel, the speed, and, of course, the lack of RSS (the horror!). However, if you often switch between Chrome and Firefox, you're probably frustrated when you start opening tabs in Firefox and they end up at the end of a long list of your open sites, forcing to you to scroll to see them.

Getting tab ordering right is not as minor as it seems. When it's right, it "just works" and you don't even really have to think about it. Minor features like this are the sort of things that you can't quite put your finger on when people ask you why you prefer your Chrome browser - you just know that you like it better. It just seems easier to use in some way.

Chrome showed us how tab ordering should work and we can't wait to see Firefox adopt this useful feature.