Try Using A Blank Home Page

Something I have swapped over to recently and found to be a very welcome change is using a blank/empty page as my browser’s home page. By doing this, my browser initially loads much faster than before. This is beneficial because if I need to get to something quickly, I do not have to wait for the data on my home page to load before the browser is completely responsive.

Here is how to make the change:

Firefox (version 3): Tools > Options > Main. Set the option for ‘When Firefox Starts’ to “Show a blank page”.
Internet Explorer 7: Tools > Internet Options > General. Set the home page to “about:blank”.

One additional bonus Firefox offers is you can still have your home page set and can easily access it by clicking the appropriate button. The steps above simply control what Firefox does when it initially loads. Unfortunately IE7 does not have this ability.

I’m sure many of you already do this and while this, like almost everything else, is personal preference, I would still encourage you to give this a shot as you might really like it.

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Jim Yafai
I have google load as my start/home page. Not the iGoogle home page but the plain old google search page. Being mostly text it loads in a flash, seeing as most times I am going to search for somthing it is a logical place to start.
http://www.twitter.com/AndrewPearce Drew
I used to have Google as my home page also but then I realized that I don’t actually use a search engine every time I open up FF. So I changed it up awhile ago.
Now I use the Fast Dial FF extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5721) which replaces my blank homepage with tabbed windows of favorite websites. I have it set up for 6 windows across, 3 down. Everything from CNN to PC Mech, Weather Underground for Tampa, Twitter, Radiobeta, Best Buy etc. Sites I generally use on a daily basis. I then use the Morning Coffee extension that Jason Faulkner recently wrote about (http://www.pcmech.com/article/automate-your-daily-morning-web-page-visits/) and that opens up 6 different sites up in the order I read them.
The blank page option with the tabbed windows takes no time to load up either also as the thumbnail images aren’t refreshed each time you open up your browser – unless you set them to refresh every minute or so.
What does everyone else have as their homepage?
True Falcon
I have my Firefox set to “show my tabs & windows from last time.” There are several tabs that I never close (news, torrents, blogs, daytrade chat, etc.) At this moment, I have 21 tabs open. The most common ones are bookmarked in a folder called “persistant” so that I can reload them all quickly if needed.

http://www.twitter.com/AndrewPearce Drew
If you you use that many regularly, you should set them up in your ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ for FF (‘Links’ folder in IE) – then when you want to open them up you just click the link on your browser and you’re there. Saves finding the bookmarked site then by a simple single click on your browser (or try the Morning Coffee extension I mentioned and read Jason’s article on it).

chuck
The blank home page feture is a great tool for those who want to access info on the fly i used to use google as my primary home page but just switched to the blank page to get content a lot faster.
Stu L
Drew, thanks for the suggestion but it doesn’t work for me. I have 14 pages that I ~never~ close so there’s no need to have a quick way to open them. I just click ‘reload all tabs’ and then check them all out. In the event that the fox crashes, I can reload them all from my ‘persistent’ folder.
I often go down a page and middle click on all the links I want to read so they open in new tabs. They get closed after reading and after launching any links I like on those pages. (i tend to accumulate a lot of tabs )
My computer is fast so there’s no perceptible delay when I change tabs and since I middle-clicked to open them in new tabs in the background, the pages are usually fully loaded when I get to them.
My computer usually runs 24-7 but when it does get shut down, all the tabs I had open come back on the next startup.
Startup takes about 4 minutes to run through my startup script (which detects if it’s a weekday early morning and then loads up my daytrading environment) which loads Firefox, Thunderbird, IM, Skype, coretemp, gpg, weather watcher, calendar prog. Autohotkey takes care of all this and arranges the windows for me on 4 monitors. Actually ‘bootsetup.ahk’ is the only program in the startup group. This way, I control the startup order and position of everything just by maintaining that file.
I might be a bit of a geek – I type in dvorak on a 2030DV – you can see one here:
http://www.typematrix.com/ordernew/view_2030dv.php