Mozilla released Aurora version of Firefox which is available for download and testing with New Tab Page, SPDY turned on by default, redesigned default home page that offers links to access bookmakrs, history, add-ons and more. Aurora offers much improved awesome bar which auto-completes URLs as you type. These are the significant changes and lot more under the hood to interest an early adopter to test to see what’s in store for upcoming Firefox 13.
SPDY on by default in Firefox 13 Aurora
SPDY protocol designed by Google as an alternate to HTTP to reduce latency of pages has been built into Chrome and Chromium allows faster loading of Google services/sites like Gmail,Google, YouTube and other sites. Mozilla joined with Google to bring SPDY to Firefox and this is indeed turned on by default in Firefox 13 to offer faster browsing experience of Google’s sites to users.
There are some sites that are SPDY enabled including that of Google’s , we’ve covered SPDY indicator extension which available for Firefox and Chrome that shows indicator whether the sites loaded in browser is SPDY enabled or not.
Much awaited New Tab page arrives for Firefox in Aurora
New Tab Page which Chrome has for ages when introduced -shows thumbnails of web sites you visited by fetching from your browser history is now available in Aurora. So in Firefox aurora version, now whenever you open a new tab now thumbnails of most recent and most frequented pages are shown – no blank new tab now on wards!.
Firefox default homepage revamped for quicker access to bookmarks, history, settings and more
Default Firefox home/start page has been redesigned so that you can now quickly access bookmarks, history, settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync from the respective icons provided at the bottom of the page. You can also restore previous session from about:home page, which definitely worth an addition.
And Awesome bar which Mozilla doesn’t talk much these days auto completes URLs as you type.
You can download Firefox 13 Aurora from here.
I have the new tab page showing 9 sites, but none of the thumbnails have images…. they are just blank rectangles with a name below them.
I have the same problem as Michael Freeman. Thumbnails are blank. What gives?
Make sure Firefox browser history doesn’t gets cleared on exit and also don’t use cleaning tools like CCleaner to delete browser history on daily basis.
I don’t do either of those things with the history or use cleaning tools like that. Nonetheless, the problem continues and I am on Aurora 14 and soon to be Aurora 15