Selecting your browser’s home page is a crucial life decision because it’s the first thing you do when you fire up you browser. Duh! Choosing wisely will save you years worth of lost keystroke time (give or take), whereas pointing your browser in the wrong direction automatically will waste precious instants of daily productivity. Where does your browser land?
My answer is that it’s more than just one. Ever since I began using Firefox many years ago, I’ve been able to start with several home pages. Currently it’s three:
[ol][li]Google News[/li][li]Gmail[/li][li]Twitter[/li][li]Zap2It[/ol][/li]No, SDMB doesn’t make the home page list but it’s bookmarked in a folder containing about a dozen message boards I follow (half of them being SDMB boards) that I periodically open with the “open all in tabs” function. Zap2It opens the “my calendar” page showing upcoming broadcasts (and rebroadcasts) of various shows I follow. Google Calendar itself has been on the list before but now that the calendar gadget seems to be working (GMail labs) I can see my current agenda embedded right on the Gmail page.
By having these pages as the first few tabs in the browser, I can instantly navigate to them by typing Alt+N where N is 1,2 3 or 4. Alt+9 takes me back to the last, right-most tab.
I stopped setting up a home page about 5 years ago. It used to be Yahoo because I read the news headlines. Now I just leave the default Firefox google search home page.
All the office pc’s have our employers web site as the home page.
Chrome is set to load up whatever was up when I last closed it so it could be anything and everything. Facebook, Gmail, Pandora/streaming radio, Wikipedia, and Youtube are almost always included, though.
I also love that, if I click open another browser tab, Chrome gives me a choice of my most recently visted sites. So all I have to do to get to FB, Gmail, Dope is click on it.
Another Google.com. From there, a few search terms will get me almost anywhere I want to go (even if I haven’t bothered to bookmark it) and one click will get me to gMail.
Years ago I created a simple HTML document in Word. It’s a plain table with a collection hof hyperlinked keywords on it. It acts kind of like the bookmark toolbar, but spans the whole page and has a hint of organization to it (i.e. reference materials over there, fun things here, tech items there, etc.). Very useful and of course very fast. Since several links help troubleshoot our home servers, routers, and modems, its local storage helps bring up links when the Internet is down.
Similarly, I use a “quicklinks” page I created eons ago for the entomology department. I’ve used this for years at work, and often at home too. With links to the library, email, search, other departments/centers/associations, software, etc, it’s pretty much my universe.
For other pages that I use frequently, I just drag them under the toolbar so they’re always available.
