14 DAY TRIAL // With Firefox 12 out of the way, Firefox 13 has been graduated to the Beta channel. Unlike its predecessor, Firefox 13 Beta actually has plenty of things to be excited about. Firefox finally gets a new tab page, albeit a spartan one, and the homepage has gotten some improvements as well.
New tab page
A new tab page has been in the works months if not more. Firefox did several experiments, but only recently got around to adding the feature to the browser by default.
There was a test in Firefox 12, but the new tab page wasn't ready and got pushed back to Firefox 13.
It's ready now and should be making its way to the hundreds of millions of people using Firefox in about six weeks' time.
It's not that impressive though, all you get is nine tiles of your most visited sites which you can customize by pinning the sites you want, so they don't get pushed down, or by removing the ones you don't want. No bookmarks, no recently visited sites, nothing else.
New homepage
The default homepage in Firefox, the custom Google search page, has been revamped as well.
It's gotten a very cool, clean look and, more importantly, a set of buttons at the bottom pointing to the most common tasks, downloads, bookmarks, history, add-ons and so on.
Given that the homepage is used generally by less tech savvy users, most people just have their browser recover the tabs that were open previously, the new buttons are a welcomed addition enabling users to get to these features without having to fiddle through the menu.
On-demand tab load at startup
Speaking of restoring the last open tabs, Firefox 13 also introduces a very useful feature for those that regularly have a lot of tabs open. If you enable Tabs on Demand, Firefox will only load the tabs that are visible when starting up.
Then, as soon as you click on another tab, you need the page starts loading. This cuts down on startup time and sluggishness considerably and, if you usually have ten or more tabs open, you'll want this feature enabled.
