Firefox 12 is now in the wild, which means it’s time for a new beta. Firefox 13 beta is available for download now and adds a few new features that fans should enjoy.
Mozilla has finally jumped on the speed dial bandwagon by redesigning the “New Tab” and “Home Page” areas to look more like the tile-based “speed dial” layouts found in Opera and Chrome. The new “New Tab” page lets users visit their most frequently used pages quickly, and users can pin sites to the “New Tab” page if they’d like. The “Home Page”, meanwhile, allows access to add-on management, downloads and various browser functions.
Another new feature likely to be welcomed by users is “tabs on demand”. Like most browsers, Firefox allows users to resume tabs open in a previous session. This can become a problem for people who browse with numerous tabs, however, because re-loading them all at once can take time. The tabs on demand feature only reloads the currently selected tab – the other tabs are loaded as they’re opened.
Finally, on a more technical note, Firefox 13 will be adding support for SPDY. This is a new-ish web protocol that can improve performance and security (by encrypting all web traffic). There’s also some under-the-hood changes and bug fixes, of course.
You can download Firefox 13 from Mozilla’s website.
Source: Ars Technica
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Matt,
The option to only re-load tabs from previous sessions once the tab is active (what you called “tabs on demand) has been around since Firefox 11
Thanks
I’m not entirely sure we’re talking about the same thing. What I mean is that now, when you resume a session, only the active tab will be loaded. Other tabs will be loaded when you need them. Is that what you mean?
Yes Matt, I’ve had that feature since Firefox 8 actually, not 11 as I said above.
For more details check:
http://www.my-guides.net/en/guides/general-software/247-how-to-dont-load-tabs-until-selected-on-firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/8.0/releasenotes/
Very strange. Mozilla lists it as a new feature in their patch notes.
Used to be a big fan and use Firefox all the time. Switched to Google Chrome about a month ago. But when Firefox 13 goes stable, I think I’ll return back to Firefox.
Hi, I’m on ubuntu and I don’t think we can get ff13 beta but I had 11 for the longest and just updated to 12 today. Could you guys @makeuseof do a guide on restoring my bookmarks. after I updated to 11 non of my bookmarks will import from the backups. all of my old ones are gone and I can’t add any new bookmarks no matter what I try
yeah.i don’t need to add the plugins of speed dial after firefox 13.
You’d better built-in a video sniffer, Avant’s video sniffer is very easy to use .hope firefox add this feature
update fire fox 13