Safari 4 Top Sites vs. Firefox Fast Dial extension

The recently released Safari 4 introduced a new feature called Top Sites which places thumbnails of your most recently visited sites in a tab for easy clicking. Firefox has had a similar feature for quite some time in the form of an extension called FastDial. So which one is more useful? Obviously, it depends on which browser you use. Here’s a quick comparison of each.

Safari 4 Top Sites:

The Top Sites visuals are gorgeous with its 3-D wall of thumbnails. You can add up to 24 pages to Top Sites, and pin your favorites so they’re always available. The process of pinning your favorite sites is tedious, and basically requires you to have two windows open in order to do it. Furthermore, the “recent changes” feature of adding a star to the top right corner of thumbnails of pages that have recently updated rarely works for me. In fact, I’ve yet to see a star appear on my own site which is updated almost daily. You don’t have much choice in how many thumbnails appear in Top Sites. You choose from 6, 12 or 24 pages. While this limitation keeps it simple, it’s also quite frustrating for those who like a little more control.

But the biggest problem I have with Top Sites is the fact that it uses previews of the pages themselves as thumbnails. This is ok if you have only six sites showing, but more than that requires a huge screen to really be useful. Even with 12 sites showing on a 20″ LCD, I have a hard time seeing whether the thumbnail preview is of my Facebook page, or a Flickr page. Unless the site in question has a very distinctive header graphic, it can be difficult to see what page is what at a quick glance. Even with these limitations, Top Sites is a welcome addition to Safari.

Firefox with FastDial extension:

The Fast Dial extension has been around for a long time, and while it had a rough start, it’s quite stable and highly useful in its current form. Fast Dial adds the ability to display thumbnail previews of pages in a blank tab, just like Safari 4. But that’s where the similarity ends. Unlike Safari’s Top Sites, Fast Dial doesn’t automatically add frequent/recently visited sites to the tab. You must add them manually. Think of it as a visual “favorites” tab. I set a FastDial tab as my Firefox start page. Fast Dial offers a lot of configuration options, but my favorite is the ability to not only configure WHAT is displayed, but HOW it’s displayed as well.

You can assign a custom graphic instead of using the page’s live preview as Top Sites does. This makes it MUCH easier to see what page is what at a quick glance. As you can see in the screenshot above, I have assigned custom logo thumbnails to my Fast Dial sites. No matter how large or small the thumbnails are made, it’s dead simple to see which page is which. You can even adjust how large the thumbnail previews are, regardless of how many you decide to show on the page. Don’t worry if you’re not graphically inclined, you can have Fast Dial search and add site logos automatically if you wish. From what I can tell, there is no limit to the number of thumbnail pages you can display, and you can adjust it any way you wish. Plus, you can assign shortcut keys to specific Fast Dial pages, and set custom refresh times if you choose to use the live thumbnail previews. Adding more pages to Fast Dial can be done with the click of a button in the toolbar or from the contextual menu while you’re on the page you wish to add, or by right clicking in a blank space on the Fast Dial tab page. The configuration options are numerous. The biggest shortcoming to Fast Dial is the lack of the ability to show recently visited pages. If you don’t mind clicking the History menu, this is a non-issue.

The newcomer:

Mozilla Labs is always hard at work on adding new & useful features to Firefox. If you’re running the standard version (3.0.7) of Firefox, you’re missing out on a whole lot of goodness found in the Firefox 3.1b3 beta. It’s quite stable, and wicked-fast. And it allows you to use Mozilla’s latest feature in the works to compete with Safari’s Top Sites.

Installing the New Tab Page extension alters new tabs by adding a list of your most visited sites. It’s a simple enough idea, but as of yet it isn’t very useful. You can’t configure how many sites it shows, nor can you pin favorite sites to always show up. Furthermore, it appears that sometimes it displays tabs you’ve recently closed and a search button, and sometimes it doesn’t. And the use of space on the page isn’t much too look at either – boring to say the least. It’s in early beta stages, so a lot can change, but right now, it’s just not ready for prime-time.

My pick:

I still prefer the Fast Dial extension. While it doesn’t automatically add frequently visited sites like the Safari TopSites and Firefox New Tab Page extension does, I find it infinitely more useful because I have so much control over what and how pages appear in the Fast Dial tabs. Ultimately, it comes down to which browser you prefer using. But if you’re a Firefox user, you’ll quickly grow to love Fast Dial.