While we”re waiting for the new Firefox 3.1 beta (which will probably be released on march 12th, after which 3.1 will become 3.5), the Mozilla Labs guys announced a prototype “about:tab” plugin. It builds on the ideas they put forward on the labs-blog last august and follows in the footsteps of what Opera and more recently Google Chrome and Safari 4 are doing, taking it up a notch.
After installing the plugin, a new tab will show you:
- the title and favicon of the most recently closed tab, allowing you to reopen it
- a button containing the text in your copy/paste-buffer with contextual actions;
- if URL: go to that site
- if physical address: put it on a map
- else: search for that text on google
- more actions might be added and the system will be extensible, taking from Ubiquity
- a list of six of your most visited sites, with thumbnail and title and with the most recent rss-items of that site
Although the developers claim that it’s “a rough-cut prototype” and that “the visual design isn’t right”, I already prefer this sober and functionally rich new-tab-behavior over the shiny “top sites” implementation in Apple’s Safari4. I sure hope this will slip into Firefox 3.5 in the next few months!