For the longest time, my home page was the anti-home page, about:blank. That address is nothing but a blank white screen and I used it because my browser started up faster that way. These days however, my home page is StartPage.
The trials and tribulations of what to set your home page to
Content providers and search engines have been trying for years to come up with their vision of what should be the perfect home page, but nobody has quite hit the mark there. Why? Because different people want to do different things when they start the browser.
The three things people do more often than not when starting a browser is either to:
a) Search the internet
b) Check email
c) Read news
Some content providers try to stuff all that together on the home page, which ends up being a convoluted mess. Yahoo! is a classic example of trying to do too much, as they stuff everything on their home page. Search, "trends", mail, a bunch of crap in the sidebar, video, news, etc. Way too much.
AOL on the other hand is a lot more "civilized". While true they try to stuff just as much content as Yahoo does, it loads faster and everything is easier to read because the text is bigger.
MSN, the "I use the default home page for IE and never bothered to change it because I don’t know any better" page, is slightly cluttered but still loads fairly quick. Personally, I think MSNBC is better than MSN, even though the tiny text at the top is somewhat annoying.
If you have a search engine as your home page, it’s probably Google or maybe Bing. Both those pages load at about the same speed. It’s common to believe Bing loads slower because it has more graphics, but that’s not entirely true as Google loads a good chunk of scripting to do what it does.
Browser "New Tab" pages
Something that’s slowly gaining popularity is a browser-based start page, a.k.a. the new tab page. This loads really fast and shows things in large-icon style from pre-cached thumbnails of the sites you most often visit.
Opera users with "Speed Dial" have had this feature for years, and more recently, Google Chrome’s new tab page is liked by many. In both browsers, these do make for great home pages of sorts because they give you super-fast shortcuts to where you’re most likely to go.
For example, with Chrome, the "Most Visited" clickable option at the bottom of a new tab page brings up something that will look like this:
As far as a home page is concerned, this is a really good option. No, you don’t have to be logged in with a Google Account to use it, so you can use it without sharing out the data.
What’s your home page?
Blank page? MSN? Yahoo? A search engine? Leave a comment and say what your home page is and why you prefer it.
Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:
Blank page… for years. Then typing a few letters of sites I’d visitied before quickly brings up the site I want to go to (pcm brings up pcmech (and pcmag), g brings up google, am brings up amazon.com, etc.
cuzzzzz
The Big G
Is there a chrome like new tab page for chrome?
Used to set IE to about:blank just to get decent load speeds. Not with Chrome I use the add on, Incredible Start Page. Bookmarks, notes to yourself, and the Chrome address bar search.
I had blank page for years. About a year ago I found out about http://myfav.es/ Highly recommend.
I check my E-Mail when I first get on my computer. I USED to be able to get my “Spam Mail” as my home page, so I could sift through it, to be SURE it IS all “Spam” before deleting them.
#1.) Why can’t I get “Spam Mail” as my home page anymore?
#2.) Why do I get things in my “Spam” that ISN’T “Spam”?
The home page for my main machine is
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ and I get a pretty astronomical image when I start up. On other machines, I have the weather report – often useful where I come from!
Yahoo. As you said its cluttered but i only need the news and mail so it suits my needs. I never really touch the others though.
google.com lol