Firefox 13 brings revamped home, tab pages

Mozilla has finally answered to consumers' wishes by revamping the home and tab pages in the latest version of web browser Firefox. Dubbed as version 13, it brings new icons at the bottom of the home page to give easy access to bookmarks, history, settings, add-ons, downloads and sync preferences.

Consumers will now also see thumbnails of most recently and frequently visited websites on the new tab pages. These thumbnails are customisable and can be added or removed based on user preferences.

In addition to the UI changes, Firefox 13 also includes memory optimisation improvements and changes to the way a previous session is restored. Rather than opening all the tabs present in previous session at once, it will now only load the active tab, other tabs will be loaded as and when they are made active.

Firefox 13 is also the first version to support SPDY network protocol, which is an alternative to HTTP and reduces web page load time. It was originally proposed by Google and is currently supported in only some websites like Twitter apart from Google. SPDY achieves reduced load times through compression, multiplexing, and prioritization.

Firefox 13 is available for download from Mozilla's website.