Many people have been raving about the grid of small screenshots that shows on the Google Chrome homepage, which displays your most frequently visited websites. However, there has been an add-on to Firefox with even better features for quite a while.

It’s called Speed Dial, and it allows you to set your browser’s homepage as a grid of squares with screenshots of websites that you define. Not only that, but it has tabs so that you can define the websites in various different categories of your own choosing for easy access. You can tell the add-on to open each website in the same tab, a new tab, a new window, or the current tab when you click on its screenshot box. You can also customize the colours of the tabs and the amount of screenshots in each row and column of the grid.

If you want to see the images larger, you might choose to show 9 boxes in each tab. If you have a good eye for recognizing the front pages you like, you could even go upto 15 or 20 shots on a single page. Basically, it’s like visually browsing through your bookmarks.

However, the other nifty feature of this add-on is the reason why it’s called Speed Dial. Pressing CTRL along with the number of the box in which you’ve defined any website, you can open that website in the current tab. So for example in my Speed Dial, I’ve got Facebook as the fifth box so to open it here in this tab I’d press CTRL+5 and let go and it’ll go directly to Facebook.

For people who have 10, 15, 20 websites that they frequent and would like quick and user-friendly on-demand access to them, this is a great tool. It’s no wonder the add-on has a “phone” theme as the developer, Josep del Rio, is from uWorks, a company that develops games and applications for mobile phones and portable devices. Now it must be said that while some people are saying Google took this idea for Chrome, others point that this idea was originally coined by the developers of Opera. It’s true – great ideas don’t die, they are just reinvented for applicability to new technologies.

Things I’d like to see in future versions (or things I don’t think exist in the current version):
- Import all your bookmarks from your browser or a social bookmarking site into different Speed Dial boxes and different tabbed categories.
- Export all your Speed Dial boxes into your browser or social bookmarking site.
- Put not only websites, but computer file locations into Speed Dial.
- Setting a YouTube video as a Speed Dial box and having it play right within the box instead of a new tab.
- Given the add-on has had over 1.5 million downloads, I think Speed Dial could have a website with a community of its own and people could share “Who’s on my Speed Dial”

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the developer of Speed Dial. I just really like it as it improves my browsing experience.