Firefox 13 beta emerges with new features, tabs page
updated 02:45 pm EDT, Fri April 27, 2012
Firefox 13 to support SPDY, gets New Tab feature
With Firefox 13 due out in about six weeks, Mozilla has made an early version of the browser available to download from the company's beta release channel. The browser will get a new look WebMonkey reported, with a redesigned home page and a New Tab feature. The latter gets links to the most recently and frequently visited sites, with the option of pinning favorite sites and a button to reject sites that the user doesn't want to see.
The home page will have links to Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads, and Sync Preferences. All of these and more are available from the menu bar, however.
A new 'tabs on demand' feature restores only the currently selected tab upon restart when multiple are open prior to shutdown. This is useful to those who need to restart a single tab without waiting for the whole browser and all other tabs to reload. Tabs will reload when selected only.
Firefox 13 will bring Google's in-development SPDY protocol built-in by default, which improves on HTTP and reduces page load times in most cases. It's also more secure, as it encrypts all traffic.
