When you open a new tab in Firefox a blank page opens up and same happens with IE and Safari. On the other hand Google when it came out with Chrome replaced that blank page with thumbnails of your most recently and commonly visited websites thus giving you a jump to simply click and go on. Opera on the other hand offers “speed dial” feature with user customizable thumbnails for your favorite websites.

But now Mozilla is also coming to the game to replace the blank page with something useful to enhance your browsing experience with “Cognitive Shield”. The cognitive shield will some place work similar to Google chrome it will keep track of your recent and frequently visited pages but instead of filling up the blank page with thumbnails it will show you a dull set of icons for those pages. If you don’t take your mouse over the blank screen there is chance you might not notice but if you do it would show you color full favicons of your most frequently visited websites. Unlike Google Chrome you can also disable this behavior by clicking the asterisk in the bottom left corner of the screen.

To test the prototype you can simply download from here or read more about it on Mozilla’s blog.