Firefox 13 Released, Debuts Brand New Tab Page and Homepage

MrSeb writes "Mozilla has officially released Firefox 13. Unlike Firefox 12 (or 11, or 10, or indeed many of the recent Firefox versions), Firefox 13 is an important release with a handful of much-needed features that are long overdue. There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc. SPDY is on by default, too, which should help ameliorate the perceived speed difference between Chrome and Firefox. Finally, the developer tools (Page Inspector, Style Inspector, etc.) have been tweaked and updated!"

Comments

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[zill]

That would break every website that uses CDN or have multiple domains. That's probably half of the web right there. Not even wikipedia will load under those draconian rules.

Re:NOOOO

[Samantha Wright]

If it helps, I use Firefox 15 (Nightly), and its UI hasn't changed much since FF13, except for the inclusion of a new pop-up list download manager. I don't know of anything else that this resembles, but I find it really efficient; much better than trying to make do with clumsy "clear and close" extensions for the classic FF download manager, which itself hadn't changed since the dawn of the Firefox project.

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[kesuki]

"So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc"

you want noscript then.

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[Baloroth]

Why do Opera fanboys feel the need to convince everyone that Opera invented the web?

Because they did, more or less. Tabs, mobile browsing, CSS support, built-in adblocking (which no other major browser even has, as far as I know), speed... yeah, Opera pretty much pioneered everything important about modern web browsers, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[cerberusss]

Or Ghostery

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[magic maverick]

That'd be RequestPolicy actually. NoScript doesn't stop images from external domains being loaded (the 'traditional' way of tracking across the web).

Re:Tab launcher garbage was first thing I turned o

[d3ac0n]

Aaaand i just figured out how to disable that.

In about:config, just type in "newtab" and search

You will get 3 choices.
First one is the URL for new tabs. Set it to what you want (I use about:blank)

Set the other two settings to false and the fancy schmancy crappy new tab is gone.

How to disable the newtab page

[Golden_Rider]

First thing I did was to look for an option to disable the "Newtab page" (the feature that Firefox shows you your most used websites including little pictures of them whenever you open a new tab). Seems the Firefox devs decided that this is such an important function that there is no option to disable it in the settings dialogue, or at least I could not find one. But you can disable it via about:config and then setting "browser.newtabpage.enabled" to "false". Guess that is handy if you do NOT want your boss/colleagues to find out about your "hotponysex" fetish whenever you want to open a harmless Intranet page while somebody standing next to you.

Re:How to disable the newtab page

[ftobin]

There's a button you can hit on the top-right of new tab pages that toggles the setting you found.

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[similar_name]

According to Wikipedia a browser called InternetWorks had tabs in 1994.