The case against browser bookmarks is not that bookmarks are bad. It is that bookmarks are stored in a folder hierarchy that requires navigation — open the menu, find the folder, find the link, click it. For sites you visit every day, this is 3-4 seconds of friction per navigation.
Speed dial solves this problem spatially.
How speed dial works
Speed dial shows a visual grid of site shortcuts. Each shortcut is a tile. The tiles are large enough to click by position and approximate shape, not by reading the label. After a few days of use, you know roughly where each site lives on the grid without looking at the text.
This is spatial memory — the same mechanism that lets you reach for the coffee mug without looking at it, or find your keys by feel. The visual grid creates landmarks.
Speed Dial Hub for Firefox
Speed Dial Hub replaces the Firefox new tab with a customizable grid:
- Create tiles for any site with a custom icon URL
- Organize tiles into named groups (Work, Finance, Reading, etc.)
- Groups keep the grid navigable as you add more sites
Speed Dial Hub — Firefox Add-ons
Comparison to bookmarks for daily-use sites
| Speed Dial | Bookmarks | |
|---|---|---|
| Navigation time | 1 click from new tab | 3-4 clicks through menus |
| Visual identification | Spatial / icon-based | Text-based |
| Organization | Groups (flat, visible) | Folders (hierarchical, hidden) |
| Number of sites | Best with ≤30 | Scales to hundreds |
| Use case | Daily-use sites | Long-term archive |
Speed dial and bookmarks serve different purposes. Speed dial is for the 10-15 sites you open every day. Bookmarks are for the hundreds of sites you save to access later.
History: Opera invented this
Speed dial was introduced in Opera 9.2 in 2007. It was widely copied but never built into Firefox or Chrome natively. Opera's implementation is still considered the standard.
Speed Dial Hub is a faithful reimplementation for Firefox: visual grid, custom icons, grouped organization. The Opera pattern that Firefox never added natively.
Speed Dial Hub is one of 11 Firefox extensions I built — see the full series.
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