Mozilla has announced the winner of a competition in which participants were asked to design a new home tab for Firefox 4.0. After two rounds of voting and nearly 3,000 votes, Mozilla has crowned Yatrik Solanki the victor.
Solanki describes his concept as "Identifies, a website launcher, browsing sessions, and a task-oriented ultrasmart search box define my concept. And it's cool!" If you're not sure what to make of that, check out this video after the break.
The design centers on four elements intended to give users a place to start, but not necessarily consume content. Among the features is search box with added functionality inspired by Ubiquity, and an Identities section with automatic logins to your favorite sites. More interestingly, once you've added sites, RSS notifications can be configured and synced across multiple platforms.
A sessions section could automatically open sites commonly browsed together, for instance, all of your favorite news sites could be saved as a single session. In addition to the sessions is a visual history which shows a browsing trail across time. Solanki says it is perfect for times when you can't remember how you wound up on a site, and it shows a thumbnailed timeline of your activity.
While none of those features are revolutionary per se, they would be great additions to the current Firefox home tab. There is no guarantee that Mozilla will use this design in Firefox 4.0 and the interface would likely be modified, but it at least offers a peek at what might be on the way.