Before Chrome removed speed dial, I had bookmarked sites I visited every day: email, project tracker, documentation, news. With speed dial, they were one click away with visual context. After Chrome removed it, I was back to the bookmark bar — a strip of text with no visual differentiation.
Firefox never had speed dial built in. So I built it.
What Speed Dial Hub does
Replaces the Firefox new tab with a visual grid of shortcuts. Each tile has:
- A URL
- A custom label
- A custom icon (emoji, text, or uploaded image)
- A group it belongs to
Groups are collapsible. The whole grid is drag-and-drop reorderable.
The favicon problem
Browser speed dials typically use the site's favicon. The problem: favicons are inconsistent. Some sites have clean 32x32 icons. Others serve 16x16 PNGs that look pixelated at speed dial tile sizes.
Speed Dial Hub lets you override the icon entirely. Assign any emoji as the icon, type a 2-character abbreviation, or upload any image. The grid stays visually clean regardless of source site quality.
Why groups matter
You do not use the same set of sites in all contexts. Work sites, personal sites, project-specific resources — these are different mental categories. Groups let you organize tiles into these categories and collapse the ones you are not currently using.
A collapsed work group at the weekend, expanded during the week. A project group that gets collapsed when the project wraps. This context-shifting is faster than hunting through a bookmark folder.
The comparison to Momentum and other alternatives
Momentum is beautiful. It is also a subscription product that tracks your usage and sends data to a cloud. Speed Dial Hub is a local extension with no cloud component. All data stays in Firefox. No subscription.
Install it
Speed Dial Hub — Firefox Add-ons
Free. No account. Works in Firefox.
This is one of 11 Firefox extensions I built — all free, no-account, no-server. See the full series for the others.
Top comments (0)