Help us test the New Tab Page!
by Tim Taubert on February 10, 2012
Over the last weeks we worked hard on getting the New Tab Page into Firefox. It’s not quite ready yet but we need your help testing it. We enabled it by default on Nightly and decided to give it a week on Aurora to get feedback from those users as well.
Nightly: http://nightly.mozilla.org/
Aurora: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/
We’ll disable it for Aurora again on February 16th (next Thursday). If you liked the feature and want it back then just set the preference ‘browser.newtab.url’ to ‘about:newtab’, ‘browser.newtabpage.enabled’ to ‘true’ and restart the browser. You can easily file bugs using the following link:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=General
Please make sure you don’t report a duplicate bug and check the dependencies of the original New Tab Page bug before filing – bug 455553.
41 comments
I suggest you should provide a link to the New Tab page’s bug on Bugzilla to prevent people from filing duplicates of known bugs.
by Siddhartha Dugar on February 10, 2012 at 2:34 pm. #
Good point, I’ll add that, thanks!
by Tim Taubert on February 10, 2012 at 2:35 pm. #
I hope this preference will still exist when this feature is released, preferable visible in the UI, since this is probably the most useless functionality ever integrated into Fx and it would really annoy me to death. For all pages I visit regularly, I have bookmarks with short keywords, two letters, so I do CMD+N/T, type two letters, hit enter and I’m there. The page is on my screen before I could even move my hand to my mouse. And chances that I opened a new tab/window to visit a side I have visited recently lean towards zero anyway. A blank page is just perfectly fine with me, setting the home page to blank is the very first thing I do after installing Fx on a new system; maybe right after getting rid of the annoying search field in the toolbar, since of course I have keywords for all search engines I use more often as well.
by Mecki on February 10, 2012 at 5:15 pm. #
We do have multiple types of users. You’re clearly keyboard focused thus not really in the target audience of the New Tab Page. There is a ‘x’ button in the upper-right corner that lets you disable the new view and just gives you the old blank page.
by Tim Taubert on February 10, 2012 at 5:21 pm. #
I’m sorry, I think I might have focused to much on “using my keyboard is better than using a mouse”. That was not the message I actually wanted get across. The real message is: No matter which pages would appear on such a “new tab page”, chances that I don’t want to go to any of these are much higher than chances that the page I’m looking for is among them. I played a lot with that feature when Apple added it to Safari, but I soon discovered, this feature is like… you know when your code editor tries to be smart and offers you auto-completions in a list, however, the identifier you are looking for is never among the first 20 entries of that list? Yes, I guess you do ;-) No big deal, but when this pop-up starts to annoy you or when you accidentally keep auto-completing when you shouldn’t, you soon will either switch auto-completion off for this project or switch to a better code editor.
by Mecki on February 10, 2012 at 6:01 pm. #
Fully agree, this functionality would have no benefits for me.
by Alex on February 14, 2012 at 2:08 pm. #
add bookmark menu or bookmark bar.
I use it to have many bookmarks on new tab page.
by calca on February 10, 2012 at 5:28 pm. #
I’m a mouse-driven person, but I find the new tab view cluttery. I like a blank slate when I open new tabs and windows. I’ve never liked having something load up automatically (which is why my home page has always been set to about:blank, for example). I expect lots of people will like the new tab feature though; I’m just not one of them.
I think the method for getting rid of it is hard to discover though; it really should just be a checkbox on the Tabs panel in the preference window. I wouldn’t have noticed it myself; I had to look around and find a place where someone mentioned it.
by Eric Shepherd on February 10, 2012 at 5:48 pm. #
Yes, I agree that this is not really easy to discover. We’re thinking about having a drop-down menu in the Preferences dialog that lets you choose the url for the new tab page.
by Tim Taubert on February 10, 2012 at 5:54 pm. #
[...] has been available in Nightly releases for a few weeks now, but it has been turned on for a week onthe Aurora channel so more users can provide [...]
by Firefox’s New Tab Page lands on Nightly and Aurora channels • Mozilla Links on February 10, 2012 at 6:25 pm. #
I love that Mozilla is working on the new tab page. I think it’s essential, so keep working on this. At first glance, it seems this new tab page isn’t super useful. I think it should be two things: 1) search. The default search engine chosen by the user should show up in a large search box on the new tab page. The cursor should be placed here immediately upon opening the new tab page. 2) intelligent, quick access to recent browsing history and the ability to add frequently visited sites. For example, a few suggestions for recently visited sites and an area where the user could pin sites that they know they’ll often want to visit after opening a new tab.
In other words, this is a good start and I’m thrilled it’s getting attention, but still a long ways to go in my opinion.
Other than that, I think the original goals should be of paramount importance. Namely the new tab page should be unobtrusive, useful, and should load almost instantly.
Just my two cents! Hope it helps!
by Matt on February 10, 2012 at 6:54 pm. #
I’ve open a new tab. One of the website in the list is twitter.com. I’ve open twitter in a tab. I open a new tab again, it shows me twitter.com again.
1) I think the website shouldn’t be in the list if it has already open in a tab.
2) Could the website be directly open in an “App tab” if it was in that state the last time it was open ?
Thanks for your work on our amazing firefox !
by regisg on February 10, 2012 at 9:21 pm. #
please, leave that out. you can make it an addon, but it’s annoying and will just slow the whole thing down.
by meep on February 10, 2012 at 10:08 pm. #
If you don’t like it, you can disable it easily. We always ensure that new features do not slow down the browser and regress our latest efforts.
by Tim Taubert on February 12, 2012 at 3:06 pm. #
Why? Why i am interesseted in old tabs?
That is crap taken from ie or crome.
A new tab – a blank side! Nothing need more.
Please invest time in other things – garbage collection is still a bad thing (FF 11 beta).
by XeniosZeus on February 10, 2012 at 11:45 pm. #
When this goes final, I hope there’s a way to retain a blank tab option on startup. I quit using Google Chrome after they incorporated this ‘feature’ with no way of shutting it off.
by Mark on February 11, 2012 at 2:31 am. #
Even now you can easily disable the New Tab Page. You will of course always have a choice about your ‘new tab’ preference.
by Tim Taubert on February 12, 2012 at 3:07 pm. #
What I would like to see if I open a new Tag:
-Pages, which I often want to visit
-Search on search engine
-Last visited Pages if I want to see them
by Yusuf on February 11, 2012 at 5:09 am. #
[...] [...]
by Hinweis: Mozilla Firefox Vorabversionen - Programme und Tools - Seite 23 on February 11, 2012 at 8:19 am. #
Whats the point in completely cloning chrome? just do you own browser, because when you reach your goal being just like chrome, then noone will need firefox anymore, because its just another chrome and i can use the original.
by someone on February 11, 2012 at 10:38 am. #
Auf manchen Bildern erscheint auf der rechten Seite ein (schmaler) vertikaler schwarzer Balken!
by Werner on February 11, 2012 at 12:03 pm. #
Ja, da wird wohl der vertikale Scrollbalken noch nicht richtig mit einberechnet. Wird behoben!
by Tim Taubert on February 12, 2012 at 1:04 pm. #
Hi,
I have not seen the page as I use iceweasel 10.0.
However what I see, this new option seems to be useless for me.
I have the pages which interest me and which I scan permanently while browsing, all in a bookmark folder. On start-up I go to bookmarks, select that folder and the option “Open all in tabs”.
That is all I need..
by mylo on February 11, 2012 at 12:22 pm. #
What can the NTP do that the omnibox dropdown can’t?
Aside from showing less entries, of which half are duplicates. Why would it even show other entries?
Oh right, you’re about to remove that dropdown.. makes me sad. The Omnibox is the one thing that FF is doing substantially better than any other browser.
You could just show the dropdown when opening a new blank tab, there’s your NTP feature with what.. half a line of code except you can now navigate it with both keyboard and mouse. Too simple, not shiny enough?
by bla on February 11, 2012 at 12:37 pm. #
Awesomebar, as awesome as it is, it’s also sometimes embarssing when someone else sits beside you and just wans to enter a page he needs.
Now even more so, you sit with someone else and he just wants to open a page and show you something, he opens a new tab, presto, sees als your favourite pages.
Before cloning other browsers I’d heavily invest in how many people use this really. If it shows the one you want to visit regularely, you type them in the awesomebar anyway; it’s just faster.
If it shows the history of pages visited: who says people are interested in viewing them.
I guess I’m also on the other side: better invest in peformance and more smooth user updates then in this.
Sorry
by Markus on February 11, 2012 at 5:57 pm. #
You are right in saying that the fewest people will be interested in viewing the page history. They/I want to start a new page and so other things than the history are much more interesting on the tab home page:
- Access the my (favorite) bookmarks (replacement for bookmark bar)
- Icons of most favorite pages, configurable (my list will contain at least a webmailer, online calendar and online address book).
And I liked the idea to use the tab home page as a staring point for chat (messanger).
An of course there must be a googe/bing/whatever search box.
The history of tabs might also be there but a) optional or b) as a simpe drowndown menu.
by Bert Speckels on February 14, 2012 at 10:20 am. #
The ability to list installed extensions (like Google’s Chrome) should be crucial – you should add the ability to switch inside pages with a XUL-Tabs-Syntax.
by gitnut on February 12, 2012 at 1:06 am. #
I can’t help wondering why you decided to go with thumbnails instead of the favicons + automatically sampled colours that was previously proposed and shown.
The current solution IMO takes much longer to decipher.
by David Naylor on February 12, 2012 at 11:16 am. #
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[...] Webseiten, wenn man einen neuen Tab öffnet. Tim Taubert, einer der Entwickler bittet in seinem Blogeintrag um Hilfe beim Testen der neuen Funktion, die in den Nightly-Versionen von Firefox 12 bereits Einzug [...]
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by HTML5 bullets: Sencha issues developer scorecard for Chrome on AndroidQuick iPhone Apps | Quick iPhone Apps on February 13, 2012 at 2:12 pm. #
Features
1) lists
– Recently Closed Tabs
– Recent Browsing History
– Open Tabs, emphasize pinned App Tabs->switch to
Each of them grouped by domain
Each of them with single-items removeable (incl. undo ;-) )
2) form fields: search: default search engine and others.
3) Bookmarks [recently used ones]
4) RSS news
Those (1-4)
* must be disableable /removeable with one click.
* Should contain an evaluation/rating algorithm, which previews have been opened most often, which have been closed?
* Why not enable users to re-layout it? But plese, remember the layout for the next time, unlike the current tab group implementation.
Why isn’t the new tab group Ctrl-Shift-E view used/combined with that?
Hope this is valuable input, like to join further discussions.
Regards,
Flo R
by Flo R on February 13, 2012 at 3:03 pm. #
[...] that displays thumbnails of the user’s favorite pages, much like Chrome. The developers are asking for testers to try the new feature, which is present in the Firefox nightly build and will be enabled by [...]
by HTML5 bullets: Sencha Labs issues developer scorecard for Chrome on Android | androidless.net on February 13, 2012 at 5:19 pm. #
If this new feature has to be included in the new versions, please make an option where it can be turned off permanently and don’t change the user’s settings when updating the browser. I find this feature, where it loads thumbnails of previously visited site, very annoying and is one of the many reasons I quit using Chrome. Even Opera allows you to turn this off. I can see there is an option now, but it is not intuitive in its location nor is readily apparent that it can be done. I can turn this off in IE as well. I’ve never considered this a needed or useful feature.
by JKH on February 14, 2012 at 2:54 am. #
[...] that displays thumbnails of a user’s favorite pages, most like Chrome. The developers are asking for testers to try a new feature, that is benefaction in a Firefox nightly build and will be enabled by default [...]
by HTML5 bullets: Sencha Labs issues developer scorecard for Chrome on Android | Breaking News | Latest News | Current News on February 14, 2012 at 9:08 am. #
That’s all? I can’t help but I am bit disappointed. I know there will come more in the furture but I expected a little bit more than this.
As far as I found out there is no possibility to
- use a custom image/icon
- change appearance of the home tab (number of columns, smaller/bigger previews for example)
- Editable title
An where are all those nice features I found on some drafts?
- Google Search Box
- Chat (Messenger)
- Apps
I know some of these features will come but the current status is poor, sorry!
by Bert Speckels on February 14, 2012 at 9:44 am. #
This screen looks really tiny on a high resolution monitor.
I also don’t understand why the page title is on the page snapshot itself. It makes the contents less visible.
I have to sadly say that Chromes solution is better. Having the page snapshot scale and not covering the contents with the label.
by Pepe on February 14, 2012 at 3:14 pm. #
[...] that displays thumbnails of a user’s favorite pages, most like Chrome. The developers are asking for testers to try a new feature, that is benefaction in a Firefox nightly build and will be enabled by default [...]
by HTML5 bullets: Sencha issues developer scorecard for Chrome on Android | Breaking News | Latest News | Current News on February 15, 2012 at 3:08 am. #
[...] dark divided while some-more work is done. Head over to Firefox Engineer Tim Taubert’s blog for details on how to re-enable a new add-on page if you’d like to keep regulating it after that [...]
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