After releasing Tab Candy (now called Panorama) which has now graduated and is available in the latest Firefox 4.0 betas, Mozilla experiments with yet another very interesting concept called Home Dash. Is Home Dash revolutionary or is Mozilla trying too much? You decide.
What is Home Dash?
Home Dash is an experimental Firefox 4.0 extension that remove the conventional Firefox user interface items (location bar, search bar, the tabs) and provides a dashboard with search functionality which you can use to find your top sites, tabs, history or do a web search. It's like using Firefox in full-screen, but without the actual full-screen (weird, I know, but you'll understand exactly what I mean after watching the video).
Here is the Home Dash introduction video:
Here is the Home Dash introduction video:
How does it work?
Once installed, you'll only have the Firefox window border and a Firefox logo in the top left corner of the window - clicking the Firefox logo (or hitting Ctrl + L), you'll activate the Firefox omnibar where you can search for a tab, your history, Google, enter an URL and so on. On the right, you'll also see a gird of your most visited sites and the last opened sites which you can hover to preview the page or click to switch to it.
Also, you can switch between open tabs using Ctrl + Tab or Ctrl + Shift + Tab.
Also, you can switch between open tabs using Ctrl + Tab or Ctrl + Shift + Tab.
Home Dash 4 + Video
Because Home Dash is still experimental, it's kind of buggy for now. Also, features are removed or added with each release so a lot may change in new versions.
The latest Home Dash version 4 - released today -, improves how you switch through open tabs: only the relevant pages to the currently focused page are displayed in the top right area. Also, the tab switching functionality now supports mouse scrolling for going through the open pages. Starting with version 4, you can easily close a tab by right clicking the Firefox logo. You can see the a complete list of changes for Home Dash 4 HERE.
Watch the video below for a quick Home Dash 4 demo:
Install Home Dash
Before installing Home Dash, you may want to enable the Menu Bar in case it's disabled (if you use the new Firefox menu) or else you won't be able to access the Addons dialog (in case you want to disable / remove Home Dash) and other options you may need. Enable it by right clicking on a toolbar and clicking on "Menu Bar".
Home Dash requires the latest Firefox 4.0 beta and can be installed from HERE (the link on the Mozillalabs is wrong because the latest Home Dash 4 is not yet available on the extension page but only on the versions page). After installing the extension you won't have to restart the browser to use it.
Did you try Home Dash? What do you think?
