New prototype tabs from Mozilla Labs

The screenshot of the Firefox page at the top shows how it’s likely to be the tabs in the next Firefox 3.1 release. As you can see, the right side of the blank page shows thumbnails of popular pages that the user visits. In the upper left (seen in this screenshot from the developer) will be located «Quick-access bar», allowing you to search on all the same popular and recently viewed pages. To top it off, the latest page updates will be automatically downloaded, for example - Gmail and Yahoo! Mail have RSS feeds, so if a user frequently views mail via the web interface, after several visits the browser will automatically (without any google-yandex panels) check new mail. The goal of Mozilla developers is simple and obvious - add convenient, lightweight and useful navigation tools to the empty tab.

You can try this opportunity today by installing the latest Firefox 3.1 build being developed , and after that - the prototype of the “New Tab” extension released last week.
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It is possible that such functionality will be enabled by default in Firefox 3.1, but even if this does not happen, it will appear in one of the upcoming versions of Firefox.

Mozilla Labs Blog via ArsTechnica