Skip to main content

Mozilla Labs – New Tab Page For Firefox

Mozilla Labs have revealed a new design for the New Tab page in Firefox. It’s designed to be zero-configuration and minimally distracting to users. The current version divides the New Tab page into contextual actions on the left and quick-access to sites on the right side. The list of sites is driven by the concept of frecency (jargon for frequent + recent) with support for RSS feeds on sites which appear in the list. Here’s a screenshot of how the Google Reader site appears in the list:

Google Reader in New Tab

The contextual actions are designed like Ubiquity and provide one-click access to a useful action. For example, here’s the one-click to undo a previous Close Tab action:

Undo Close Tab

Likewise, with something in the clipboard, the contextual action displays a one-click Search button:search In tests so far, there’s one annoying bug – bringing up the New Tab page seems to lose focus from the address bar and from the Firefox window! Other comments on the Mozilla Labs page have also highlighted the privacy issues with showing RSS feeds like Gmail in the New Tab page. In its present state, it seems like Chrome and Safari 4 provide a much better experience for the New Tab page.

If you are using the Firefox 3.1 beta or newer release, the New Tab prototype is available as an extension.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Migrating from Palm Calendar to Google Calendar and iPhone

Here are the free steps to migrate from Palm's date book (or Pimlico's DateBk6 ) calendar to Google calendar for full iPhone sync. First, sync Palm with Palm Desktop . Next, open Palm Desktop, select the Calendar view, navigate to File | Export, select Export Type as Date Book Archive, Range as All and provide a file name. This will export the calendar data as Date Book Archive (.dba). There's a paid tool called DBA2CSV that converts .dba files to .csv files. However this can be done for free using Yahoo Calendar. Login into Yahoo Calendar and via Settings/Import, import the .dba file. It helps to have an empty Yahoo Calendar. Via Settings/Export, export the calendar as .csv file. Login to Google Calendar (also works with Google Apps For Your Domain GAFYD Calendar) and import the .csv file into any of the calendars. It is a good idea to create a test calendar and test the import before importing into your real calendar. That way if anything goes wrong, you can delet

Lead Tide SIM Reader

I recently came across a cheap little device for reading SIM cards . It was available from Meritline for less than USD 5 with free shipping. Curious to see what it was like, I ordered one. The device came in a small package along with a mini CD containing drivers. The packaging advertised the device as the LEAD TIDE Sim reader . Like most things these days, it's made in China. The device has a USB 1.1 interface. There was no product code or number anywhere on the packaging. Installing the drivers for the device turned out to be harder than I expected. The mini CD's autorun installed some stuff but Microsoft Windows XP couldn't install any suitable driver for the device. The mini-CD had several top level directories with what appeared to be product codes but I couldn't match any to the device itself since it had no product code. Google searches revealed that I wasn't alone in my endeavors to get the device working . Further digging revealed pointers to some thir

Syntax-highlighting code in blog posts

SyntaxHighlighter is an easy to use syntax highlighter for posting code snippets in blogs. Here are the steps to incorporate SyntaxHighlighter into Blogger : Go to the blog dashboard and select Layout for your blog. Choose Edit HTML. In the <head> section, paste in these two lines: <link href='http://syntaxhighlighter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Styles/SyntaxHighlighter.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> <script language='javascript' src='http://syntaxhighlighter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Scripts/shCore.js'/> In addition, for each language that you intend to highlight, add lines to import the relevant JavaScript libraries. The full list of supported languages is here . Here's the example for XML: <script language='javascript' src='http://syntaxhighlighter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Scripts/shBrushXml.js'/> Finally, right at the bottom before the </body> tag, add: <script