14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla Labs has been the source of plenty of interesting experiments, many that have graduated and became part of Firefox or full-fledged projects. Home Dash is one of the most exciting yet, if only because it's such a radical new approach to a browser UI. It's also iterating at a fast pace, the latest update adds some tweaks to the tab management interface and functionality.
"Home Dash 4 focuses on improving how you switch through your open pages," Mozilla's Edward Lee, the man behind Home Dash and the Prospector project, writes.
"Instead of seeing all your open pages in the top-right area when Home Dash appears, the visible pages will be limited to those that are relevant to the current page," he adds.
"The left-most thumbnail will always be the current page and thumbnails near the current page are related. The right-most thumbnail, past the dashed line, represents an unrelated page that you were looking at before switching to the current page," he explained.
The change makes it easier to focus on the group of tabs you're currently working in since only related tabs are show in the thumbnail view by default.
If you're only interested in two or three tabs, the change makes sense. It also makes it easier to switch between different tasks in the browser.
However, if you're using a lot of tabs, it's easy to get lost since you have no visual cues about the total number of tabs you have open and how to get to them. The average user only has a few tabs open at any given time, so maybe this isn't much of a problem for most.
There are also a couple of tweaks to make tab management better, you can right click on the small Firefox icon on any page to close it or scroll over the icon to move through tabs.
If you're running the latest Firefox 4 beta you're good to go, just grab the latest Home Dash 4, unless you have a previous version installed in which case you'll be updated automatically, and check out what a browser could look like in the future.