New prototype tabs from Mozilla Labs

The screenshot of the Firefox page at the top shows what the tabs are likely to look like in the next release of Firefox 3.1. As you can see, on the right side of the blank page are shown thumbnails of popular pages that the user is visiting. In the upper left (seen in this screenshotfrom the developer) “Quick-access bar” will be located, allowing you to search all the same popular and last viewed pages. To top it all, the latest page updates will be downloaded automatically, for example, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail have RSS feeds, so if the user often views mail through the web interface, then after a few visits the browser will automatically (without any google-yandex panels) check new mail. The goal of Mozilla developers is simple and obvious - to add convenient, lightweight and useful navigation tools to an empty tab.

You can try this feature today by installing the latest development build of Firefox 3.1, and then the prototype of the “New Tab” extension released last week.

It is possible that such functionality will be enabled by default in Firefox 3.1, but even if this does not happen, it will appear in one of the next versions of the new Firefox.

Mozilla Labs Blog via ArsTechnica