Opera had speed dial in 2007. Firefox never built it in. Chrome added "New Tab" pages with limited customization. Neither ever gave users what Opera had: a visual grid of their most-visited sites, with custom icons, organized into groups.
This is a gap that persists in modern Firefox.
What Speed Dial Hub does
Replaces your Firefox new tab with a customizable grid of site shortcuts. Each shortcut is a tile with a custom icon and label. Tiles are organized into groups that you define.
This is what Opera's original speed dial looked like, rebuilt as a Firefox extension.
The case for speed dial over bookmarks
Firefox bookmarks are stored in a folder hierarchy. To navigate to a site, you open the bookmarks menu, find the folder, find the link, click it. This takes 3-4 seconds.
Speed dial is a visual grid. You see all your shortcuts at once. The tiles are large enough to click without reading carefully. It is a spatial memory tool — after a few days, you know roughly where each site lives on the grid without reading the labels.
For sites you visit every day — email, project management tools, news, banking — this is significantly faster.
Groups
The grouping feature is the difference between a useful tool and a cluttered one.
You can create groups: Work, Reading, Finance, etc. Each group is a section of the grid. This scales to 50+ shortcuts without becoming unnavigable.
Bookmarks can be organized into folders, but folders are not visible at a glance. With groups, everything is on one screen.
Custom icons
Speed dial tiles support custom icon URLs. You can set any image as a shortcut icon. For sites with low-quality auto-detected favicons, you can use a cleaner version.
Why not just use the new tab?
Firefox's default new tab shows recent history and suggested sites. This is passive — it shows what you visited, not what you intend to visit. Speed dial is intentional: you decide what appears on the grid, and it stays there.
Install it
Speed Dial Hub — Firefox Add-ons
Free. No account. Works in Firefox.
Speed Dial Hub is one of 11 Firefox extensions I built — all free, no-account, no-server. See the full series for the others.
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