I have a homemade html page that lives on my hard drive. It has all my favorite links laid out by groups in an over-sized table. Since it’s on my hard drive, it loads in an instant.
Very convenient.
Cool. Care to start our own kickball team?
I have my.yahoo page as my home on all the browsers on the machines I use. Mainly because I have a buttload of my favorite links sitting on it - also my local weather, news, comics, TV listings, Business news, and tools.
Since I use so many different machines (3 on my desk at work, 3 at home) I only have to make one reference page. Also, If 'm helping somebody else with their computer problems have an internet accessible source for my favorite diagnostic links.
I used to do that, but now I just have the sites that would have been on that page on my toolbar as direct links, which ends up being just as fast, plus with FoxMarks it means that it stays updated on all of my computers without having to use a networked html page or remember to update a copy on each machine.
I use Opera. When I start my browser, all the sites that were open when I closed it last, reappear.
It is beautiful.
Also, Opera has this feature that I don’t use where, instead of a blank tab, it shows you a page with like 9 of your home pages, and you can click on each one to zoom in.
Yes, my iGoogle page. Everything at a glance when I first launch Safari. From news RSS feeds, local weather, my gmail, to the frickin’ phases of the moon. All neatly sequestered where I want them in modular boxes I can shift around. I also have RSS feeds from Digg, Ain’t It Cool News, and MacWorld down one column, and even a little space of my most used bookmarks (like the SDMB of course). It loads in a flash, and is better than just a blank page. I use it regularly… almost depend on it!
My Firefox browsers all start with what I closed them the last time each was used. Since I use my browsers everyday at work and at home, each opens with 10-20 open tabs every time.
Three tabs: My Speed Dial page (which has 15 sites on it), Gmail, and my Yahoo email. New tabs open my Speed Dial page.
Firefox loads Google on launch; that confirms that I have an Internet connection, it loads quickly, and I do a lot of searching. New tabs open blank.
I have bookmark folders on my toolbar for Daily (about a dozen that I open all at once every morning), Weekly (for sites that update once a week, one subfolder for each day), and Now & Then (like the SDMB, which I load only when I have time to shag down all the New Posts and not plotz the search by leaving it in the middle).
I also show file extensions.
I love the new “Undo Close Tab” feature, for when I close a tab by accident and immediately go “D’oh!”
Am I the only person on the planet who hates and rarely uses tabbed browsing?
At home I have it set to my hotmail log in and at work I set it to google.
I like the tabbed browsing but how the hell can I set a home page for additional tabs? When I open a new one it goes to Yahoo search. I want it to go to Google since 99.9% of the time the reason I open a second tab is to search for something related to the first tab.
It opens up to my homepage on my personal website. That way I know if the internet connection is working properly.
I have an iGoogle page with timezone clocks, weather, and news as my homepage for IE at work. I don’t tend to open other IE windows or tabs, but instead open Firefox as well, which has my work e-mail page and subsequently blank tabs. I don’t care for tabbed browsing, but I use it when I have a lot of pages open to let me close or minimize all the pages at once.
I set my Firefox to start on Scroogle Scraper – identical to Google, except that they don’t keep records of IP addresses/searches. Very frequently, when online, I detour to look up something or other, and I like not to have to go to a search page after I open the new window.
Probably. I couldn’t live without it. The combination of windows and tabs allows me to group similar pages in a convenient manner.
In one window, I might have fifteen blog tabs open, in another I might have a dozen SDMB tabs, and in a third I might have news, comics, weather, Woot!, or who knows what.
So instead of 35 browser windows open, or 35 browser tabs open in one window (either of which would make everything too crowded to navigate), I’ve got a manageable number of tabs in a manageable number of windows, and can easily find everything.
In answer to the OP, I’ve set Firefox to automatically open a blank page. Though I may try Belrix’ approach. My bookmarks toolbar is in the overflow situation, even after shortening most of the links’ names to just a few characters.
I believe I belong on this kickball team. 
Although I’m completely on board with the no-extensions-drives-me-crazy crowd.
I don’t have the skillz/patience for a homemade html page, so my browser defaults to my Protopage (here’s a link so you can make your own) where I have lists of places I go to frequently (main page) and lists of other interesting places I’ve found grouped by topic (other pages). Yes, it’s an enormous set of bookmarks.
Profuse thanks go to a Doper who mentioned Protopage in a thread about free web stuff.)
New tabs are blank, as well they should be.
I have an iGoogle page as my home page. I’ve got Straight Dope linked to it, as well as my Gmail, various news sites, Recipes of the Day, Sayings of the Day, Wikihows of the Day…and a cute theme of a fox that lives in a pagoda and eats sushi.