(Guide/Review) Yet another speed dial is an simple, customizable new tab replacement extension for Firefox and Chrome

[Karlston]

Yet another speed dial is an simple, customizable new tab replacement extension for Firefox and Chrome

Yet another speed dial! No, I'm not complaining about anything. That's the name of a speed dial extension for Firefox and Chrome.

 

 

The add-on is meant to replicate Opera browser's famous feature, and it does so rather nicely.

 

Once installed, Yet another speed dial takes over the new tab. The add-on starts with a blank page, and displays some steps to help you get started.

 

Add speed dials

The easiest way to add speed dials is to visit any web page and right-click on it and select "Add to Speed Dial" from the context menu. The extension saves a thumbnail screenshot of the page to be used for the dial.

 

 

The second method is to click on the new tab button, and then on the large + button to add a new site. Paste the URL of the website to be added in the text field, and click on "Add to Speed Dial". The add-on opens a new tab to load the site to save its thumbnail.

 

 

Another way to add dials is by bookmarking a page and placing it in the Other Bookmarks > Speed Dial folder. This also ensures your bookmarks are synced with your Firefox/Google account.

 

 

Rearrange the position of a dial by dragging it to a different place. Right-click on a dial to open it in a new tab, new window or private window. It can also be used to delete a dial. You may edit a dial's settings including the URL and the image, the extension lets you choose between the web page thumbnail or the favicon, or you can use a custom image from your computer.

 

Settings

Right-click anywhere on a new tab, or click on the gear icon in the top right corner of the add-on's page to access its settings. Yet another speed dial lets you use your own wallpaper as the background. Prefer a solid color instead, you can customize that too. Don't like the label (title) displayed below every dial, toggle the setting. The + button (Add side) can be disabled as well. The last option on the settings page sets the dials to be vertically aligned on the screen. Hit the save button to apply the changes that you've made.

 

Incompatibility with Firefox Containers

Yet another speed dial worked well with Chrome (Microsoft Edge Chromium), but I had some trouble with the extension on Firefox. It wouldn't capture the images for the dial, or even add the dial when I used the right-click menu. The issues page on the add-on's GitHub didn't have any reports related to this. I had almost given up on the add-on thinking it was broken, and if there hadn't been a Chrome extension, I certainly would've. That's what made me curious, why it would work in one browser but not in the other.

 

 

I disabled some of my other add-ons in Firefox to narrow down the issue. Eventually, I found the answer. It appears the extension is not compatible with Firefox Containers. When I tried to add a dial for a web page that is configured to load in a container, the extension would not finish capturing the images. Also, the right-click menu was non-responsive when used with contained websites.

 

 

For e.g. I've set Ghacks, Reddit, Google (Gmail, Docs, etc.,) to load in their own Firefox Containers. When I tried to add these pages to the dials, only one of these worked (Google.com). Even Google's sub-domains like Gmail and YouTube couldn't be added.

 

 

This wasn't the case for web pages that were loaded normally (no containers). For e.g. Yahoo, GitHub, SourceForge, etc. The extension's "Add to dial menu" and + button worked perfectly with normal pages.

 

 

To put this theory to the test, all I had to do was disable the Firefox Multi-Account Containers add-on, and then try adding the web pages using Yet another speed dial. It worked. You may want to use this as a temporary workaround, but I won't recommend disabling containers permanently, because Privacy & Security > convenience anyday.

 

Yet another speed dial is an open source extension. Download it for Chrome or Firefox. It does not sync to any cloud service, which is a good thing. There are no way to organize dials in folders, and the lack of an option to backup your dials is a bit disappointing as well, since there's no way to restore dials in case you reset Firefox (or Chrome).

 

Landing Page: https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial

 

 

Yet another speed dial is an simple, customizable new tab replacement extension for Firefox and Chrome