The two current threads re: Yahoo! made me wonder about actual use of the “home page” feature of Web browsers. So I’ll ask: do you have your browser set to automatically open a particular Web page when you open a window? If so, why?
I don’t. I’ve set all my various browsers (I currently have 11 different browsers on my Mac, though six of those are Mozilla variants) to “Open a blank page” when opening a new window. I’ve done this with my browsers since about two weeks after I first got on the Internet in 1996.
My sister does load a portal (Yahoo!, I believe). My parents have their browser set to automatically load one of their personal sites. My roommate’s home page is the Google search engine. He’s one of those computer illiterates who still hasn’t figured out the address bar; he goes to Google, types a URL into the search box, and then clicks on the first link in the search results. I find it absolutely maddening when I’m visiting and I want to show them something on the Internet, because I’ll launch their browser and get halfway through typing a URL, only to have the browser interrupt me, delete what I’ve typed, and load their home page.
I can understand wanting to use a “home page” the first time you launch your browser each day, since it can be a handy thing for those sites you typically visit first thing each day. But once you’ve hit those sites and done your business there, why would you need it to keep popping up every time you open a browser window? Especially if you have a slow connection? If you have a site (like a Web-based e-mail account, stock quotes, weather, etc.) that you need to check repeatedly throughout the day, isn’t it easier to just open that site once and then keep that window minimized in the dock/Start bar (or whatever Windows calls it)?
You can have Firefox open any number of tabs you want as your home pages, so I have new windows pop up with gmail, BBC news, and iGoogle (simply because typing google.com redirects me to google.co.jp). However, now that I’ve discovered Opera’s speed dial exists for Firefox, I may set my home page to just that. I’ve always had new tabs open as blank, and now they open as blank with speed dial, so it’s the best of both worlds. Yay for innovation!
to hell with you IE. When will the comet come that asphyxiates that dinosaur? Oh right, when MS’s monopoly collapses
My start page is my own page of favoured links. No images, all text. I occasionally update it, add stuff, make it pretty, then go back to just text. I am my own portal.
Technically I use the Google search page, because it can quickly get me to wherever I want to go. But I have one of those keyboards with seven little automatic browser launch buttons, and 75% of the time I just hit one of them (say, SDMB, for example) and get directly into the site I want.
I use iGoogle (silly name, I know) and I like it much better than my old yahoo homepage. From the moment I open my browser, I can see my recent gmail, the local weather, a few news headlines from specific sources I chose, my to-do list (editable without leaving/reloading the page), who’s logged in to google talk, search boxes for googlemaps and wikipedia, and when I’m ready to move on, a list of my favorite links. I’ve got everything I need on one page that loads very fast.
Is anyone still opening multiple browsers windows? Tabbed browsing is the wave of the future, sport! I have tabs set to load nothing.
Indeed! I rarely have more than one window open, but use tabs extensively - I was an “early adopter” of tabs, since I immediately saw the benefit when they first appeared.
Keep in mind that I’m on a Mac, which means closing my browser window doesn’t exit the program. And I close windows frequently, especially when switching back and forth between my browser and my e-mail client. This most often happens when I get SDMB notifications that there is a new reply to a subscribed thread; I’ll click the link in the e-mail, which switches me to my browser and opens the relevant thread in a window. Then when I’ve read the new posts I close that window and go back to my e-mail client.
Since the program doesn’t quit when I close the window, I suspect we Mac users are more likely to frequently open and close windows. So that’s part of why “home pages” frustrate me when I’m on somebody else’s computer. The other person is likely to be using Windows, and out of habit I’ll close the browser window if I’m done with a particular page and don’t have an immediate new destination in mind; conversely, the Windows user would probably just leave the window open and thus doesn’t have to deal with the “home page” loading over and over and over.
In any case, the SDMB is pretty much the only site I visit more than once a day. Can you imagine the frustration if I had the Dope set as my home page and had to wait for it to load every time I opened a window
I use excite.com for my home/portal. It’s got everything I want to access right there. News, tv listings, weather, reminders, and all the links I frequent.
The drawback? Google toolbar shows 11000+ popups blocked in about 8 months of the computer being on 24/7.
ETA: About the only time I have multiple browser windows open is when I’m reading a Web page, but pause to check my e-mail and then click a link in an e-mail. For these instances, I have my browsers set to open links from external programs in a new window rather than replace the content of the current window. This is because if I have it replace the contents of the current window I’m liable to close the window when I’m finished (instead of hitting the “back” button), and then I’d have to go digging through my History to get back to where I was before. I could have the external link open in a tab, but I prefer my current method. I use tabs mainly for links that I click on the page I’m currently reading. I have these links open in “background” tabs, so that I can check them once I’ve finished reading the current page.
I use iGoogle, showing the Gmail inbox, news, weather, and a handful of links.
I don’t open new browser windows. I start Firefox and minimize it when I’m not using it, but I usually don’t close it. I open new tabs all the time, but that doesn’t cause the home page to be loaded.
I use MSN as my home page. I just got used to it and it suits me fine. I have no idea what tabs are. Yes, I’m that computer-illiterate. I just don’t have the time I used to have to play around with things.
At work, my home page is my work home page, because it actually has stuff I need for work.
At home, it’s set for google. Just regular google search, not their portal feature. It seems that most times I fire up the computer, it’s because I’m about to search for something random, so that works. I would like to state for the record that I do NOT type the URL in the search box, like the roommate mentioned in the OP. I’m fortunate to have a speedy connection so that’s not an issue.
I used to use Google (clean, loads fast) as my home page but recently changed to iGoogle. I like having the weather and other doo-dads at my fingertips when it loads. My laptop is getting on in years and it tends to load a little slow.
I use iGoogle, loaded up with RSS feeds from favorite sites (blogs, news), weather, gmail, and a couple of to-do lists. I love the theme, too (I’m using the Japanese theme with a fox that changes activities with the time of day, Animal Crossing-style).
[hijack]Have they fixed the FF memory leak bug yet, and I just haven’t downloaded the updated version, or is it still doing that?
For those who don’t know, often times when you close a FF tab the memory being used for the program stays at the same level as it did before you closed it. So if you have a FF session running in which you have opened and closed 50 or so tabs in that time, the memory usage for FF is the same as if you had 50 concurrent tabs open.[/hijack]
I had the same thing for years. About six months ago I switched to iGoogle, but I think the old way was better. The advantage with iGoogle is that I have widgets with news and so forth set up on it, but I probably could have incorporated them into my document if I’d spent 10 minutes thinking about it. I may eventually go back to the local HTML document.
