Over the weekend we have been playing around with lots of new Firefox extensions ^[1] and you can expect quite a few posts about interesting ones in the coming weeks.

Opera’s Speed dial is one of the best features in the browser, it allows you to quickly save and open your frequently visited pages without having to type in the URL. Firefox ^[2] on the other hand does not seem to have such a feature but you can easily get it with the Fast Dial extension.

Fast Dial for Firefox replaces the about:blank page with a panel of thumbnails of your favorite sites. To assign a website to a panel you need to click on it and assign a URL to it, once you have done that Fast Dial will create a thumbnail of the current site and display it to you, on clicking the thumbnail you will be quickly taken to the site.

Main Features of Fast Dial Firefox Extension

• You can change thumbnail's position by drag-n-dropping it. (Hold Ctrl while dragging to move thumbnail into a group.)
• Left click on a thumbnail title opens "Properties" dialog. Middle click on thumbnail title runs thumbnail refresh.
• Alt+number keyboard shortcut opens assigned site.
• If you move mouse over thumbnail's top, a panel of graphic buttons appears.
• To view zoomed image press left mouse button and hold it for a moment.
• You can customize Fast Dial page colors & font in Preferences.
• You can create nested pages of thumbnails by checking "Group" checkbox in thumbnail properties.

A definite time saver for launching sites that you frequently access.

Download: Fast Dial Firefox Extension ^[3]