Clearly Unclear

What do you use for your browser’s homepage? Is it Google, MSN, Yahoo, or a custom version of one of those sites made by the maker of your browser? Perhaps you’re like me and over the years you’ve changed it many times CNN one week, then the New York Times, then maybe TSN. Or you might even be a Firefox user and you leave so many tabs open when you close your browser that you haven’t seen your homepage in months.

All of those are great options, but recently I’ve found myself being frustrated with my homepage choice. I no longer leave tabs open when I close Firefox (when I use it, I’ve recently been using Chrome), as I find it takes much too long to launch a browser when it has to load 5-10 tabs every time. Having Google or some Firefox startpage with a Google search bar has never really made sense to me… browsers like Firefox & Chrome offer Google search functions either in a search box or Omnibar.

I could just pick one of my favourite sites, but there’s about 10-15 sites I check on a daily basis and pick one doesn’t seem practical when I could have a start page that organized these sites for very quick access. Chrome’s new tab page is great (screenshot found below), it takes the top 8 sites you visit and presents you with thumbnails of each site for very quick access. You can even pin certain sites to stay there so they don’t drop down. That’s a great option but what if you want something different?

Recently I’ve found two very interesting sites. One is Fav4.org. Fav4 allows you to pick four sites from an ever expanding list and presents you with a simple page with those four site icons (screenshot found below). It saves everything with your browsers cookies, so there’s no need to signup or login. But because it works that way switching browsers or computers requires you to go through the simple setup again. If there’s four sites, and four sites only, that you use more than any other, I think this is definitely worth checking out.

The second is Start.io. This site requires you to signup, and editing your startpage requires a login, but it gives you a lot more to worth with than Fav4. You start by importing your bookmarks, I imported just those bookmarks in my bookmark bar, my most used sites. After that it allows you to edit them down, organize them, change the order, add colour, etc. In then end it leaves you with a very simplistic text based site with a personal URL, that you can access from any computer (screenshot below). You can even password protect it if you want.

So there you go, three great options if you find yourself bored by the standard old homepage you’ve been using for 5 years. Give them all a try and see which one you like best.

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Tagged: Chrome, Fav4.org, Firefox, google, homepage, Start.io