It has taken a long while, but finally, Mozilla is bringing a more helpful and lively new tab page to replace the current blank page you normally get.

It has been available in Nightly releases for a few weeks now, but it has been turned on for a week onthe Aurora channel so more users can provide feedback.

Initially you get a set of Firefox recommendations based on your most frequently and recently visited pages. You won’t get a thumbnail until you actually click on one of them. Somehow I couldn’t get a thumbnail for my local bank or twitter no matter how many times I clicked on the thumbnails, but this is part of the bug hunting at this stage.

You can reorder, pin or remove (and undo) a thumbnail. You can also drag a bookmark to a thumbnail position to add it to the new tab page, though it is not discoverable at all. I just tried for good and it worked.

There is no option to rename the thumbnail or add more items to the page, but the whole idea is to make this a simple unbotrusive feature. New tab backgrounds are also under consideration but there is no ETA, so don’t hold your breath.

For a do-it-all new tab page, I recommend New Tab King.

The new new tab page is coming with Firefox 13, that is June later this year. To try it now, grab an Aurora build, or, if feeling particularly bold, a Nightly.

As announced last month, Mozilla has integrated the Tilt 3D extension into the core Firefox code in the latest nightlies, adding yet another improvement to the set of web development tools currently in the pipeline.

As with the Tilt 3D extension, web developers can look at a 3D rendering of a web page and easily see how elements are nested and organized. You can drag the 3D view to rotate it, pan it with the arrow keys, and zoom in and out with the mouse wheel.

Lacking in the implementation so far is a legend, a virtual rotation/panning pad,  and even export capabilities found in the original extension.

To access the 3D view, from the Firefox menu, select Web Developer, then Inspect. From the Inspect view, press the 3D button in the lower right area (or press Alt + M hotkey to toggle).

Considering the 6 weeks release cycle, 3D view should become available in final form with Firefox 12, planned for late April.

To try it now, you can get a nightly, or the Tilt 3D extension from Mozilla Add-ons.

As expected, Mozilla has announced that it has extended its commercial agreeent with Google for three years.

Details on the agreement are confidential, but it means that Google will remain as Firefox’s default search engine for the foreseeable future.

There have been a number of articles in the news for the last month about the risk Mozilla was at because of the well known expiration of this contract in last November, which amounts for as much as 80-90% of Mozilla’s revenue.

You’re reading an article but you need to see as much of it as possible at a time, perhaps for copying or comparing some text to another window.

Instead of manually scrolling the page to find the right spot, you can right-click on wherever you want to scroll to, and select Scroll here, courtesy of Scroll Here, a Firefox extension developed by Alex Henry.

Available at Mozilla Add-ons.

Aurora, Firefox alpha development branch, has just got some important additions to its web development tool set.

Among these, perhaps the highlighter is the single most important feature of the group. With highlighter, you enter into inspect mode, where you just need to hover web page elements to highlight them, while breadcrumbs in the lower part of the screen tell you the exact path to that element. You switch from inspect to no-inspect mode by pressing Esc. Pretty easy.

I have seen similar tools before (including the great and simple Aardvark), but Firefox’s implementation is just and plainly smooth: the transition from highlight to highlight makes it just as fun to see as it is informative. Whatever it is doing, we need the same for everything in the user interface: tab animations, location bar menu, tab groups, Firefox menu, etc.

For more details, press the Style button in the bottom toolbar to see the rules that are applying to the current element and the effective properties. You can edit the rules and see the changes in real time

To see the HTML code of the selected item, press the HTML button in the inspect toolbar.

The web console is now more powerful thanks to additional objects now available for debugging. If you have previously used Firebug, you should recognize a few of them, like console.dir, console.time, console.group. For example, enter console.dir(window) to see all the window object properties.

Finally, a more powerful code editor is now available for Scratchpad making it easier to write scripts for the current page.

A complaint I have is styling among the several web tools. The web console looks dull. The highlighter looks on fire. So together they seem part of completely different products. Hopefully, this will get sorted out in the Aurora or Beta phases to make them look good as they work.

Don’t hold your breathe for these tools though. Aurora means we are getting all the cool stuff in Firefox 10, scheduled for release on January 31st. If you feel ready to try them, check Mozilla’s Aurora web page.