How about integrating contextual actions with Firefox’s protocol handlers (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Web-based_protocol_handlers)?
For example, if you have a mailto: handler assigned, the new tab page will offer a contextual action to email someone, etc for map:, tel: cal:.
You’d need to merge the management tools, so adding a new protocol handler would also add your contextual actions.

Microsoft has already created a specification to allow this exact behavior on new tabs (and in other places) called Accelerators (formerly Activities)

It already has a specification (OpenService) that would fit perfectly in this context.

We should consider using the OpenService specification to define what actions would be presented on this page for selected content:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc289775(VS.85).aspx

Excellent

That all looks fantastic, particularly the restore session aspect.

I very often open a new tab and then load the homepage in it. On my desktop I can do this by middle-clicking the home button, but on my laptop I don’t use middle-click (because it’s awkward) so it’s Ctrl+T, Alt+Home or click New Tab, click Home Page. I therefore propose that this new about:blank has a very simple way of getting to the home page.

It seems like the net tab page would become some sort of dashboard where a user gets quick access to the most probable tasks.

I think the approach is fine, provide we keep one of the most important features of dashboards: customization. What may be good for some users may not be necessary for others.

I would like to have is all the components to be sort of widgets a user can remove and arrange at will:
- the search widget
- popular pages, customize: show feed items on/off
- context search widget/accelerators
- recently closed tabs widget
- and, my personal favorite: a new feed items widget, which works somewhat similar to Atul’s Ambient News except that it filters out already visited feed items and they are not grouped by feed but mixed and ranked by a index that considers which feeds get the most feed items visited, the highest % of items visited, and recency. So for example if I visit 90% of all feed items of a feed it is most likely I would like to visit new ones, on the other hand if a feed has 100 new feed items a day but I only visit two or three of them it should rank lower. Ideally it could even identify which tags I prefer for a certain feed.

The discussion would then move to what should be the default layout of this new tab dashboard: my personal take: search, closed tabs, popular pages and feeds.

I don’t think a list of context search options is the best option for speeding data brokering. Instead, I find IE8’s automatically prompting the Accelerator’s menu on text selections a more intuitive, discoverable, faster way of moving data around. We could do the same either supporting Accelerators (open services) or just bringing the added search plugins a la Context Search (*perhaps* with an option for the user to mark which ones he want to see in the context menu).

I like the idea of empowering the new tab page a lot!

As long as it will be customizeable and about:blank will be renamed I like it :D

What do you think about showing the “special result” of Google (like it’s shown if you search for a calculation or currency conversion) if there is one for the clipboard content?

Don’t we want to encourage people highlighting text on a page, right clicking on the highligthed text, and launch those actions from the context menu?

Will FF3.1 get those thumbnails into places, too?

As some people said, just make sure that we’ll still be able to use a genuinely blank about:blank page without installing any extra extensions … With that you’ll avoid most complaints, and everyone will be happy.

What can I say. It sounds great! You have really thought this through and that is what makes Firefox shine! How every feature is made as easy as possible.

I’m not sure sure about dropping the crash recovery dialog. For one, we have seen people with obscene amount of tabs, restoring all of them individually sounds painful. Of course you could just add a “restore all” UI to the tab recovery pane.

Additionally though, I find the UE cumbersome. Firefox crashes, you restart, no UI to recover. You open a new tab, then you click on the other pane, and then you can continue your work.

I’d rather leave the dialog in, and have the tab restore for the case where one of your recovered tabs actually crashes instantly.

Tab related stuff I would like to change in FF 3.1 :-)

1) Loading a page in a tab should never block other tabs or the whole browser.

2) I don’t like the ordering of the “open in new window” and “open in new tab” items in the url context-menu
[when you right-click on a url (link)]. The ordering of these items should be “open in new tab” and then
“open in new window” (actually I’ve never used the context menu’s “open in a new windows” at all)

3) Whenever a new page is opened (in the foreground) in the new tab, the mouse-focus should be set automatically to this new tab.
That way you could immediately start scrolling within this page without having to click on the page to get the mouse-focus.

4) I like the concept of the speed-dial add-on. Frankly that’s all I need.
The only thing I would like to add is the idea of thematically organised speed-dial pages.
For instance in the morning when I start my work at the university office i would like to speed-dial to a set of
pages that I always use for my studies. But after 2 hours of work I get tired
and I start looking for a car (jep I need one right now:).
Now while I’m looking for new cars I would like to switch to a different set of speed dial pages
(mainly related to car vendors, car forums etc.). After finishing searching a new car, it might start looking
for a new appartment, again i need another speed-dial start page.
Switching around speed-dial pages should be fast and easy.

One could easily extend this concept using bookmarks. While I’m surfing the web using my ‘university’ speed dial page I will certainly bookmark some new interesting pages. These pages should automatically
be related to the ‘university’ speed-dial page. So when I open the ‘university’ speed-dial tab, there might be
a quick access location on this page/tab, where i find all my related bookmarks. Because I don’t need my ‘funny jokes’ bookamrks while I’m looking up physical constants.

kinda automatically bookmark tagging feature.

5) List of some functionality now provided by add-ons that should be builtin:

Plain Text Links (Treat plain text urls as links)
Tab Kit (Tab grouping)
New Tab Button on Tab Right (adds a new tab button like IE7). btw. this one is a UI mmust have
Duplicate Tab (Duplicates a tab including the tab’s history)
Easy DragToGo (Allows you to opn a new tab using drag&drop gestures easier)
Context Search (Expands the context menu’s ‘Search for’ item into a list of search engines)

Great idea!
I really hope this will be implemented!

However – the right side of the contextual actions is void, is it?
For exemple, to answer at Tom Lehman’s proposal, it could show a sirectly a map in the cas of an address – in grayscales first, getting colored when the mouse moves on it.
And of course, not only for maps…

Just a thought… this new tab page, as the new tab switching interface, isn’t something “not essential”? Shouldn’t them come as extensions, packaged and installed with Firefox as the DOM Inspector is? This way those who do not want them (or need a streamlined, faster browser) could completely remove them, instead of just disabling then using (hidden!) preferences?

Definitely, they are not “structural” and no other feature depend on them, so they could come as extensions (also easier to update).

@previous posters:

If you automatically search for maps, definitions, etc., you can accidentally violate the user’s privacy. That’s one more bonus of using maps, dictionaries etc. that are on your computer. But Microsoft’s idea of context menu is what I’ve considered the best solution: If the user rolls over a menu item, show a preview of the action result. For example when the user rolls over the menu item that is for looking up words, then show the definition of the word, extracted from the page.

Perhaps not just propose contextual action based only on the last selected text, but…

… having an actions storage mechanism that stores the last TYPE of text copied matching an action….

example:

… normally, if you copy some email and do something with that copied address outside the browser, then return and copy a text that you need translated or googled/searched, this new text and it’s most-likely action replaces the mail address. What should happen is that the email address is not replaced, but stored for future use until you select another email address. Only then should the first mail address selected be replaced by the new. Even better… have a list of say 3 or 5 recently selected mail addresses. Same goes for addresses to be mapped or events to be added to calendar.

Even better have these ‘types’ or ‘kinds’ of actions act like the awesomebar, but separately only for email addresses in the email-address-actionbar only events in the calendar-actionbar etc..

Don’t know if I made my point clear ?

I’m a little with dreadnaut on this… but there is a simple fix… how about having three different styles of New Tab action that we as users can choose from in the Options/Tabs menu? The three styles I’m thinking of would look like this:

1. Traditional New Tab blank page… maybe with the option of selecting the color of the page.

2. All-in-one New Tab like the one being proposed here, possibly with customizable “dashboard” options. This would probably be default.

3. “Smart Tab”… which I would see as a an option where the previous Copied string was input into the tab automatically. If the selected string is an email address containing an @ character, then whatever webmail client is in Firefox would be opened in a New Tab, if there is no webmail client selected, then it would just do a search. If the string is obviously a site address, then the Smart Tab would attempt to open it up immediately, no Paste, Go actions required. If the string is neither an email address or a web address, then the Smart Tab would open up whatever search engine is selected in the Search Bar and proceed to do a search.

Maybe this third option could have it’s own separate keystroke and be a totally new function all-together… although it could probably be handled better by a 3rd party plug-in anyway.

I just upgraded Foxit Reader. The new version has a feature: if you open it without a PDF document it shows you two big buttons in the middle of the window (supposedly common actions). As unprepared as I was I had to stare at them for 5 seconds before I realized that I can still use the menu and select the option that I really need. This seems to be a general problem with these solutions – they force you to make a choice, even if your ideal choice isn’t presented at all. I hope the new tab solution will work around this problem somehow (maybe the dimmed-down colors will prevent it from happening).

When I open a new tab, I normally intend to type a URI. Sometimes, I use a keyword search, so I might type the keyword and then paste some text, but usually, I don’t paste text to the awesome bar. Consequently, I don’t expect to make use of the dynamic selection-based actions as proposed from a new tab created with Ctrl-T.

After selecting text, the obvious thing to do is use the context menu. If the context menu were smart enough and arranged well enough, it should provide much of what I want directly. However, a large context menu is worse than none as one spends an inordinate amount of time searching for the desired command.

I propose, therefore, that the context menu — at least one not augmented by add-ons — should be succinct and meaningful. The context menu should be customizable to permit users to reorder, add, or eliminate entries on-the-fly. (By that I mean that there can be an editor accessible from, say, the Options dialog that permits adjusting the various context menus, but that editor should be accessible from the context menu itself.) That way, a user can change the context menu the instant the fancy strikes to change it.

One of the options to include in the context menu, then, is the proposed dashboard tab. Thus, if the context menu doesn’t offer, with a relatively small number of pertinent choices, the action desired, the dashboard tab is sure to offer it. In that case, all of the suggested functionality related to the selection has bearing.

Thus, a new tab can reasonably contain the thumbnails and ability to search history, bookmarks, etc. as discussed herein, but ought not to react to the selection. If that dashboard tab is selected from the context menu after selecting text on a page, then the dashboard tab can include selection-specific content. Finally, the suggestion to replace the current tab’s contents with the dashboard tab, rather than requiring a new tab to access it, completes the picture nicely.

In calling the structure of the chromosome fibres a code-script we mean that the all-penetrating mind, once conceived by Laplace, to which every causal connection lay immediately open, could tell from their structure whether the egg would develop, under suitable conditions, into a black cock or into a speckled hen, into a fly or a maize plant, a rhododendron, a beetle, a mouse or a woman. ,

When you list actions like Map or Translate, you absolutely must list what provider they are using, ie: google map vs openstreetmap vs yahoo vs etc or google translate vs babelfish.