Dial M For Mozilla - Firefox Speed Dial Addons

If you're anything like me, you're probably spending more time in your web browser than you should, and have more bookmarks than you're willing to admit. And it's fine – as long as your bookmarks are well-organized and easily accessible. One way to achieve this is by using speed dials (also called quick dials), and today we'll go through the best and most popular Firefox speed dial addons.

Speed dials are not exactly a new feature; Opera introduced it in 2007 and since then it's been an integral part of the browser. The idea comes from the speed dial function available on telephones, where frequently dialled numbers can be linked to keys on the phone's numeric keypad. Each key is assigned to a phone number, and users can simply call someone by pressing just one key instead of typing the whole phone number.

This is metaphorically extended to bookmarks (phone numbers) in the browser (the telephone). Users can select their favorite bookmarks – dials – and display them as their home page, or in a new browser tab. Firefox offers several addons which, in addition to basic speed dial functionality, enable extensive customization and provide many useful options. All addons can be downloaded and installed from the official Mozilla site.

FVD Speed Dial with Full Online Sync

This is my favorite Firefox speed dial addon and it's the one I'm currently using. It's highly customizable – you can choose a background image, change background and text colors, set dial transparency and size as well as add custom icons for each bookmark. The most useful feature is dial groups. You can divide and sort your bookmarks into groups which are displayed as tabs on the FVD Speed Dial page.

FVD Speed Dial can track your most visited and recently closed sites, and show them as separate groups. There's also the search option which lets you search the Internet directly from FVD, and the Sync feature (requires the EverSync addon) which can synchronize your dials across different devices and instances of Firefox.

New Tab King

Another addon with plenty of features is New Tab King. Apart from the expected speed dial functionality (set as home page, open in new or blank tabs; adding new dials, adjusting their layout, size and appearance), you can keep a to-do list in this addon, track most visited sites and have it recommend similar sites to the ones you love and access often. Unfortunately, this tracking might slow down Firefox if you have (too) many dials, and it can't be turned off.

New Tab King provides detailed statistics of your browsing habits and comes with several built-in themes. If you don't find them particularly attractive, you can tweak the background image, colors and transparency. The sidebar can serve as a launchpad for your desktop and web applications (you can add and remove the app shortcuts from the Settings dialog). If you decide to use the search function, you can choose a preferred search engine from an impressive list or add your own search shortcuts.

Super Start

This addon strikes the ever-important balance between being both lightweight and feature-rich. Like New Tab King, Super Start lets you write notes in the sidebar, change the background image and dial transparency, and pick one of the preinstalled themes (Launchpad, Basic, Simple Style, Default).

The focus of Super Start is on the appearance. It lets you add placeholders – empty dials – which help you control the position of other dials; for example, when you want to arrange them in a special shape. If that's not enough for you, Super Start has the super option called custom CSS. Yes, it means that you can add your own CSS code to completely change and control the layout of your speed dial page.

Fast Dial

Fast Dial was the first addon of this type that I used, and I had it for a very long time. Many new features have been added since then, such as the search function, a customizable background, custom logos for each dial, and predefined themes.

It creates a folder in your Bookmarks menu so you can easily add new dials by bookmarking them directly into that folder. Fast Dial can also import (and export) bookmark folders, and it supports drag-and-drop dial repositioning.

Speed Dial

With a simple and straightforward name, this addon has all the features that an average user could wish for. It supports dial groups and customization options for dial size, color and name. You can drag and drop dials to rearrange them, add keyboard shortcuts and assign various actions to different types of mouse behavior (double click, middle click...) on the Speed Dial page.

Speed Dial can open multiple addresses from a single dial, which is an interesting and very practical feature. When editing a dial, you just write the addresses separated by the | character, for example: “http:///www.teksocial.com|http://www.twitter.com”. Clicking on this dial would open both sites at once.

Last but not least, Speed Dial has a special Weather Status dial which you can activate if you want to directly access the weather forecast for your area (your location is automatically determined based on your IP address).

Addons are the main reason why I'm such a devoted Firefox user. Of course, the speed dial addons presented in this article are not the only ones. New ideas and solutions for bookmark organization are constantly popping up. If you're interested, you might want to try ViewMarks, FoxTab or New-Tabmarks. They don't have as many options as FVD Speed Dial or New Tab King, but they provide a fresh approach to bookmark management.

Ivana Isadora Devcic is a freelance writer, copyeditor and translator fluent in English, Swedish, Croatian and Norwegian. She's a Linux user and KDE fan interested in web design, productivity and personal branding. Ivana tweets about the world around her as @skadinna.