As you may know, Mozilla has big plans for its browser and, among the many new features set to rain down on us this year is greater personalisation of the new tab page.
While the ability to set a new tab background image is the most eye-catching (literally) customisation change in the immediate offing, a series of smaller, more practical tweaks are in the works too, like the ability to see weather info on the new tab page.
Visiting a dedicated weather website is a proactive way to find out the latest forecast and temperature. But seeing at-a-glance conditions each time you open a new tab in Firefox (a page I see more times in an average day than my own face) is zero-effort.
Although this feature isn’t yet ready for the masses, if you want to try it out early you can. If you’ve upgraded to the latest Mozilla Firefox 127 release you can enable it like so: –
- Go to
about:configin a new tab - ‘Accept Risk and Continue’
- Search for
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.system.showWeather - Double-click the result to enable the feature
That’s it!
Open a new tab and you’ll spot a temperature reading and weather icon now sits in the upper-right corner of the (otherwise rather empty) New Tab page. As the widget strap-line notes, Accuweather is being used as meteorological backend for this feature.
You can choose to see a ‘simplified’ or ‘detailed’ (but not that detailed, mind) layout, and set Celsius or Fahrenheit as your preferred temperature unit. Clicking the widget opens the Accuweather website in a new tab for more detailed information.
Obviously, since this feature is not yet enabled by default nor exposed in the settings panel, you shouldn’t expect much of it: it’s a work-in-progress, may error out, might not be available to all locales, and so on.
Weather information is shown for an autodetected location which could be imprecise or flat-out wrong (especially if you use a VPN, a mobile tether, etc). Right now, Firefox doesn’t let you manually search for and set a weather locale, but that feature is coming.
Caveats aside, as a forecast of what’s to come, this is a cute addition.
Though in case this casts grey clouds in the minds of those wanting more substantive features, do keep in mind Mozilla has more than one developer, and lots of ‘worthy’ features are in development, they just require more effort to add, test, and roll out.