Speed Dial is a feature first introduced by Opera almost four years. It is basically a grid of the top websites you visit. From my experience, this is a very convenient way to get to my favorite websites after firing up the browser. This feature has been adopted by Google Chrome as well. Recently, Opera added more features to its Speed Dial by introducing Live Speed Dial.

Oddly, Firefox has not yet adopted this feature. According to the roadmap for Firefox 9, though, that is about to change. This is what the road map for Firefox 9 says:

This is intended to be the simplest possible version of a new tab page. The requirements are:

• Show a grid of top 9-16 sites when opening a new tab
• Responsiveness of new tab shouldn't appreciably decrease
• It should be possible to remove sites that show up in the list
• It should be possible to rearrange the list
• It should be possible to manually add a new site to the list
• When opening a new tab using keyboard shortcuts, we should visually de-emphasize the grid. (Current direction: desaturate colors to black & white, fade in colors if mouse is being used)

Users of Opera and Chrome are used to this feature and it looks like Firefox's version of Speed Dial is not adding anything new. However, as I have said before, I find this an extremely useful feature and certainly welcome the feature in Firefox.

Firefox 6 was recently released and it will be a while until we see Firefox 9.

Do you like Speed Dial in Opera and Chrome? Or do you use any Firefox extension to add this functionality in Firefox?

[via FavBrowser]