Firefox Jumps On New-Tab Real Estate Bandwagon

New tabs are blank. This has always seemed like an obvious place (since it's blank, after all) to target for some kind of content, whether its as tawdry as an advertisement or as functional as defaulting to the home page. Why tabs open blank makes sense, of course, since waiting for a new tab misses the point, which is an immediate extension of browsing possibilities.

But with Chrome and Safari 4 both moving in on the new-tab real estate, it's no surprise to read that Moxilla's UI genius Ara Raskin has posted a screenshot of Firefox's new approach to the blankness problem and explained his "quick-access strip" which takes into account the human fovea. Gotta love a guy who knows his eyeball anatomy. The new setup stacks thumbnails of your most popular pages along a "quick-access bar" along the right edge of the new tab, and sticks action buttons on the left that perform simple tasks such as searching for text you might have selected on the page from which you opened a new tab.

From the Raskin's mouth:

"From the feedback from the last two rounds of new tab concepts, we know that the page needs to load instantly (even a small wait breaks user experience); that it shouldn't be visually distracting; and that it should be a launch point into your daily activities,"

"It may seem strange that the quick-access strip is along the right of the window. It's there in order to be polite. If you've got your mind on opening a new tab and just entering a url, it's outside your foveal vision."

Polite content? I like it. Gimme.

Firefox, too, revamping new-tab behavior [WebWare]