Mozilla Labs has released an experimental Firefox extension that brings new functionality to blank tab pages. The Mozilla developers aim to use the extension as a prototype for exploring blank tab features that could potentially be included by default in future versions of the browser.
The extension, which was released last week, takes advantage of some of the browser's most recent improvements and is designed to be used with the latest Firefox nightly builds. Mozilla design expert Aza Raskin explained the new project in a blog post at the Mozilla Labs web site. The goal is to add some lightweight navigation elements that are useful, unobtrusive, and quick to load.
I tested the add-on in the latest Firefox 3.1 nightly build on my desktop running openSUSE 11.1. The add-on displays a strip of clickable page thumbnails along the right-hand side and places contextually-relevant navigation elements on the left.
According to Raskin, the thumbnails that are included in the sidebar are programmatically selected by determining which pages the user most often starts browsing from. This can be computed by taking advantage of some of the more sophisticated capabilities of the Places system which significantly improved history tracking in Firefox 3. The thumbnails are futher filtered by a "frecency" algorithm which provides matches based on the frequency of visitation and the recency of the user's last visit. This is similar to the method used to filter completion matches in the Firefox 3 AwesomeBar.
The thumbnails are displayed in grayscale--with the favicon overlaid on the top right corner--and light up when the cursor rolls over them. The thumbnails can be reordered by dragging. Some of the thumbnails are accompanied by a short list of links, which appears to be pulled from RSS feeds that are tied to the page. When I tested it myself, I observed that links to our most recent stories are displayed next to the Ars Technica thumbnail.