Firefox 4 Gets Instant Previews Courtesy of Mozilla Labs' Prospector

Mozilla Labs has launched an interesting Firefox extension that brings the concept of Google Instant, or more specifically, the new Chrome Instant, to Firefox 4. Dubbed Instant Preview, the new Labs experiment enables Firefox to load web pages as soon as you start typing, based on Awesome Bar suggestions.

"With Instant Preview, results that get highlighted in the Awesome Bar suggestions will automatically start loading, so by the time you confirm that the first result is the one you want, the page may be ready for you to use," Edward Lee, the one behind all of the Prospector Mozilla Labs project which includes Instant Preview, explained.

"Additionally, for some pages that you only need to glance at to check up on some information, e.g., the weather, stocks, or comics, you can let the page load as a preview, and once you are done, hit <Esc> to get rid of the preview and return to where you left off," he added.

Instant Preview is the natural evolution of the work done with the Prospector project. It works very much like Chrome Instant, start typing and the web page or search suggested by Firefox, and highlighted in the Awesome Bar, is loaded automatically.

The progress on Firefox 4 is going at its usual, somewhat slow pace, but some things at Mozilla move significantly faster. One of the most interesting projects to date, even if only because of the rate at which new features are added, has been Prospector.

Prospector is just a placeholder for a number of experiments related to search in the browser. The first was Speak Words, which automatically completes what you're typing in the Awesome Bar based on predictions.

Speak Words works hand in hand with Instant Previews since it provides the suggestions used to load the webpages. You can use any of the experiments separately, they are different Firefox extensions, but they work best together.

One simple and fast way of getting both features as well as automatic updates and new experiments as they come in is to install the Mozilla Labs Kit extension for Firefox 4.

Mozilla Lab Kit for Firefox 4 is available for download here.