Skip to main content

Get Site Suggestions in Firefox With Predictive Newtab

What’s with browser companies trying to predict where we want to click next? First Chrome, and now Firefox. Under the Prospector experiment, Mozilla Labs have released a new restartless add-on called Predictive Newtab for Firefox that attempts to guess, or rather suggests, a list of sites that the user may want to visit when they open a new tab.

The new tab page of a browser is a continuously evolving experiment. Long ago, there were homepages – a single website that opened whenever a new tab or browser window was launched. The idea of only one website on a whole new tab bothered a Norwegian browser company, and they launched Speed Dial in the spring of 2007 with Opera version 9.2. That was the beginning of the new tab revolution. Hundreds of speed dial add-ons for Firefox and variations of it started appearing on Mozilla’s website. Google launched Chrome the following year, and the browser by default show a list of most visited and recently closed pages along with a number of bookmarks. Opera took speed dial a step further by introducing dynamic speed dials with Opera Next early this year. Before that, Firefox was experimenting with tab grouping and we saw this in Chrome too.

Today, you can do a lot with the new tab page, thanks to the ten thousand different extensions we have for Firefox and Chrome, with Opera chipping in a handful. Add another one to that - Predictive Newtab.

predictive-newtab

Predictions based on Pandora

The idea of Predictive Newtab is to supplement the fixed list of top sites with a dynamic list relevant to what you are currently browsing, based on your bookmarks and past browsing history. For example, if you are on YouTube and you open a new tab, Predictive Newtab may suggest you Vimeo or Dailymotion, but if and only if, you have these sites in your bookmarks or in your browser history.

Suggestions are currently displayed along with some experimental statistics such as score (which is how similar the tags are), frequency (which is a measure of frequency and recency) and others. Hub determines algorithmly whether a website is good candidate for being a “home page” or otherwise important page in a website, and BM Engine is an indicator of whether the search result came from a bookmark tag.

Typically, Predictive Newtab works best if you have a large number of well-tagged bookmarks, but it should work if you have no bookmarks too, according to Mozilla. Truth is: it does not. If you want to try out this experimental add-on, a set of well-organized bookmarks is a must, otherwise you will just get a blank page.

Related: 10 Best Tab Management Extensions for Chrome

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: