Firefox to get new home page and tabs in three months

Mozilla has announced the arrival of the latest development version of Firefox 13 in the Aurora channel. This in-development version will arrive as the production version of Firefox in approximately twelve weeks. The development version includes a redesigned home page, changed "new tab" behaviour, and auto-completion in the browser address bar.

The redesigned new tab screen

When users open a new tab in the development version, they are now greeted by a grid of thumbnails of their most visited pages. If users want certain pages to remain in this grid even when they are not among the nine most visited pages, they can pin them manually.

The developers have also redesigned the home page in such a way that it now presents links to the browser's settings, add-ons and sync menus. It also includes links to access the history, downloads and bookmarks pages. Other improvements in the new experimental Firefox version include auto-completion of URLs in the "Awesome Bar" and the default use of the SPDY protocol for sites that support it.

The new home page look

More information about the changes in the 13.0a2 Aurora version of Firefox can be found in the release notes. Users interested in testing this experimental version of the browser can download it from Mozilla's Aurora channel.

Firefox binaries are released under the Mozilla Firefox End-User Software License Agreement and the source code is released under disjunctive tri-licensing that includes the Mozilla Public Licence, GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.

See also:

• Firefox 12 beta introduces automatic updates, a report from The H.
  
• Mozilla stages release of Firefox 11, a report from The H.

(fab)