Speeddial 2 – an enhanced ‘New Tab’ page for Chrome

I prefer to keep the number of extension in my browsers as low as possible – speed is nice in any situation. Of course, some of them provide essential functionality I have grown to depend on – LastPass gets installed in pretty much every browser I use – or supplement what’s missing from the minimalistic Chrome, like the extensions I use to open links in the background and the RSS Subscription Extension. This week I have added another extension to the set I use in Chrome: Speeddial 2, an awesome replacement for the ‘New Tab’ page.

Speeddial 2 is more similar to the original speed dial launched by Opera some years back; unlike Chrome’s ‘New Tab’-page it doesn’t automatically add your most used sites, but requires the user to define them manually. It does compensate for this minor set-back with a number of other interesting features:

• You can add an unlimited number of dials, choose their spacing and number of columns and customize them with pre-defined styles, colors and even custom CSS. As you’re probably aware, Chrome is limited to only 8, plus apps. Furthermore, you can define groups of dials, which will be displayed as tabs on top of the page – this will further expand the space available for the dials, but also slightly impact the performance. Adding a dial is a little cumbersome at first, because the user has to manually input the URL and name; here Opera is more user-friendly, since it auto-completes while typing using bookmarks and history. But after using the extension for a while I discovered it has another way to add dials: through the browser context menu, which makes the process easy again. For the dial image you have the choice between a pre-defined static image and the auto-generated thumbnail of the site.
• I never liked how apps are integrated in Google Chrome: you cannot have app-icons and dials maximized at the same time, so it feels like you should choose between them. Speeddial 2 solves this problem elegantly with a dock-like panel that can be added to either side of the page and that fits in nicely with the overall design.
• Again, like in the recent versions of Opera, you can customize the background of the speed dial with one of the included images or choose your own from the Internet. For now I have chosen one of my own photos of a sunset captured years ago with a Canon EOS 5D – my Google search homepage is still decorated from the same album. It’s a bit strange that you can’t set the image to ‘fit’ the window, so you’re either stuck with white space on the margins or with a cropped image; hopefully future versions will include that option as well.
• The extension integrates the browser bookmarks (and also Delicious bookmarks, with Google Bookmarks planned) and recent history into a sidebar panel; by default it’s activated as you hover over the right side of the page. Both panels have search fields, so they can easily replace the dedicated pages for ‘Bookmarks’ and ‘History’. It would be nicer if the two search fields were combined, so that we can search both bookmarks and history simultaneously – I usually don't remember after visiting a site if I also bookmarked it, so it would make it a bit more efficient. Another benefit compared to the native bookmarks menu in Chrome is that you can middle-click with the mouse to open several bookmarks in background tabs; the Chrome menu closes immediately after a click, so you have to open it again. What’s missing – unfortunately – is an easy way to restore a group of closed tabs after a browser crash: Chrome has a small link ‘Recently closed x tabs’ on the bottom, which has no equivalent in Speeddial 2.
• If you work on multiple computers – or if you have two versions of Chrome on the same one, like me – you can export your settings to get the same experience everywhere. Naturally, syncing would be even nicer; a sync solution through the Google account is high on the to-do list of the authors. Until then, you can use import/export to make small tweaks to the settings not available through the interface, for example setting the background of tiles to transparent instead of a solid color.
• As a small bonus, the extension keeps track on your browsing behavior and the click activity on the dials; the statistics can be accessed from the speed dial context menu. This is not just for display: it uses the data internally to rank the dials by your activity (if you set it that way) and to highlight the most accessed dials by time of day; this is the purpose of the red corners you can see in the screenshot below.

The best of all? You get all these new features with basically the same speed and performance we have come to expect from Chrome! You can keep up with new updates about the extension on the blog or by following speeddial2 on Twitter, or you can visit their support page to leave feedback, vote on the next features and suggest your own ideas.

via Liviu Mihai

Update: Since I originally published the post, there were some changes to the extension, including the support for making the background of tiles transparent - a popular request judging by the comments below. While my original idea doesn’t seem to work anymore, you can achieve the effect with some CSS code instead. Go to the ‘Options’, then to the tab ‘Customize dial style’, scroll down and paste this code in the field labeled ‘Custom CSS’:

#pages li a, .thumbnail_container { background-color: transparent; }

If you know your way around CSS, you can also create more complex effects, like for example restoring the color on hover:

#pages li a:hover { background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0.75); }