Firefox has finally caught up to Chrome when it comes to opening a new tab. In Chrome you are presented with thumbnails of sites you have visited prior. While there have been some extensions that have duplicated this feature, it is now part of the native Firefox UI in both the latest Nightly (13.0a1) and Aurora (12.0a2) builds. Note: it will be available for a limited time on the Aurora builds, see * at the end of this post for more details. Below is a sample from Percy’s (mozilla links) review:

Keep in mind this is still a work in progress in like Percy I noticed a few kinks myself, especially in regards to the thumbnails (or lack there of). Not sure how much I am going to be using this once (or if) it lands in June. Usually when I open a new tab, I either start trying the address in the awesome bar or simply select it from my bookmarks menu. I suppose it will speed up getting to the desired page.

* The New Tab feature on Aurora, will be turned off on February 16th (next Thursday). You can easily toggle the preference if you want to continue testing it on Aurora past the 16th. Just go to about:config and set ‘browser.newtab.url’ preference to ‘about:newtab’, ‘browser.newtabpage.enabled’ to ‘true’ and restart Firefox Aurora.