New Tab Jumpstart

New Tab Jumpstart ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8914 ) isn't the name of some geeky new action movie, although that would be kind of cool. It's the latest in the ongoing development of a decent new tab behavior for Firefox. We've covered several attempts at getting this just right, and New Tab Jumpstart is one of the best so far. It seems largely inspired by the speed dial made popular by Opera and now Google Chrome, but that's not a bad thing.

Chrome users will find the layout of Jumpstart very familiar. The majority of the page is taken up by a grid of frequently-visited sites that you can pin permanently or delete. On the right, there's a search box, a list of recent bookmarks, and a list of recently-closed pages. It's a sensible starting point for a new browser session, although it lacks the eye candy of, for example, Safari's start page.

-from Download Squad

SearchMerge

With all the hype around Twitter as the future of search, it makes sense that someone would put together a search engine that combines Google results with results from social sites around the web. Enter SearchMerge ( http://searchmerge.com/ ). It's basically just a text entry field and a selection of sites to search, including Twitter, Friendfeed and YouTube, but it has the potential to be very useful. Or, it would, if there were any apparent rhyme or reason to the order of the results.

A search for Download Squad turned up a Last.fm page, our website, a year-old Vimeo video, and a post about netbooks from February, in that order. The results were all relevant, but they could be sorted in a more logical way. SearchMerge is also fairly slow when you're using it to search every available site. The real-time search option is neat, but suffers from the same long wait for results. It's a great idea, but it has a long way to go in the implementation.