Firefox 13 Home and New Tab Pages Get Redesigns

If it works for another browser, why not incorporate it into your own, right? Much like Internet Explorer introduced tabbed browsing based off of the success of Firefox, Firefox is taking at least one page from Google Chrome’s playbook; the one regarding what to display when a user clicks a the “new tab” button.

With that in mind, two of Mozilla’s new features for Firefox 13 are now live with redesigns for the Home Page and for New Tab page. The New Tab page is where the Chrome emulation comes to mind because when users click “new tab,” they are greeted with a page that looks like the following:

Click for larger image
As you can see, the New Tab page features thumbnails of frequently-visited sites so users can have quicker access to these pages. These thumbnails can be added or removed based on user discretion. Mozilla’s engineers also introduced a memory-saving feature as well:

Firefox loads tabs on demand when restoring a browsing session to more quickly get you to Web pages. Firefox first loads the tab you are currently viewing, then loads background tabs when you click them. It’s an improvement that makes Firefox start faster and use less memory.

As for the Home Page update, when a new browser session is opened (or the “home” button is clicked), aside from the whatever web page the user selected as their homepage opening, there’s also a toolbar with the following icons available, “bookmarks, history, settings, add-ons, downloads and sync preferences with one-click shortcuts.”

An example:

Click for larger imageOver at the Firefox’s YouTube page, there’s a video of these new features in action:

The final update includes the addition of a new language version of Firefox. According to the Firefox blog, Vannak Eng and his team have introduced the official language of Cambodia, Khmer, into the Firefox lexicon. There are over 85 languages supported by Firefox, and Khmer is just the latest in this ever-growing list.