14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla Labs' Prospector project has been churning out great little experiments since it first launched. Now it's coming back with a new one, Predictive Newtab, a fresh take on the new tab page which features links to pages and websites based on what you're currently browsing and the page you're coming from.
Most modern browsers have a version of the Speed Dial, they populate the new tab page with bookmarks, favorite websites or the ones you visit the most.
These links can be dynamic, as in, they can change depending on your use, but this change is very slow.
"We’ve written a new Prospector experiment, Predictive Newtab, to explore the idea of supplementing the fixed list of top sites with a dynamic list that changes based on your behavior," Mozilla Labs' Abhinav Sharma writes.
The new experiment has two main goals when creating a customized new tab page: "make items on your speed dial more relevant to what you are currently browsing; suggest potentially interesting and relevant websites that you’ve visited but forgotten about."
For example, if you start from a site like Pandora, a new Firefox tab with Predictive Newtab enabled will list a series of web pages that will be linked to Pandora in a way, for example YouTube and Vevo music links or other music-related sites.
This is just the first experimental release so things may not always work correctly and the functionality itself could do with some improvements. But the idea is already visible and the appeal is clear.
"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, though not as well, so we if you keep well-organized bookmarks, this is likely to help you a lot. The plugin does all of its computation inside the browser and no personal information is sent to the web," Mozilla explained.