Speed Dial is an old concept — Opera had it in 1994. Visual tiles of your most visited sites on the new tab page.
Modern browsers do this natively now, more or less. But native implementations are limited: you get the sites the browser thinks you visit most, in an order you cannot fully control, with no search bar.
I built Speed Dial & Tools Hub for Firefox — a customizable new tab with visual site tiles, search, and a few utility tools in one place.
What it has
- Custom site tiles — add any site with a favicon, name, and URL
- Search bar — uses your default Firefox search engine
- Clock — time and date, displayed above the grid
- Dark/light mode — one click, remembered
- Keyboard navigation — arrow keys, enter, search shortcut
Why custom tiles beat browser-generated "top sites"
Browser-generated top sites have several problems:
- They include things you do not want — your bank, your health portal, your old job's internal tool
- They change — a site you visited a lot last month but not this month disappears
- You cannot organize them — if you want GitHub first, you cannot guarantee it stays first
Custom tiles solve all three. You choose what appears, in the order you want, and it never changes unless you change it.
Favicons without an API
Fetching favicons for custom sites is tricky. Each site has a different favicon path. The standard approach is Google's favicon service:
function getFaviconUrl(siteUrl) { const domain = new URL(siteUrl).hostname; return `https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=${domain}&sz=64`; } This works for most sites and requires no API key. The favicon is cached by the browser after the first load.
Install it
Speed Dial & Tools Hub on Firefox Add-ons
Free, local, fully customizable. If you want your most-used sites in a grid you control, give it a try.
Speed dial is a 30-year-old idea that still makes sense. The browser does not need an internet connection to show you tiles of sites you use every day.
