What start page do you have for your web-browser? Friendly Computers would like to share with you this article.
Your start page is the first thing you see when you open your browser or load a new tab—your gateway to the rest of the web. Get the most from your start page with one of these five favorites.
Whether the start page you're using is your browser's default or you've carefully selected it, checking out these five contenders for best start page will give you a chance to decide if your current start page serves your needs or if it could use an upgrade.
First, a note on our methodology. Several popular entries in this week's Hive Five are essentially clones of each other (just for different browsers), so we opted to combine the most popular just-like-the-other options into single entries in order to give you a more diverse Hive Five. You'll notice, for example, the entry on Speed Dial-like start pages includes the Chrome start page, Opera Speed Dial, and Speed Dial for Firefox all in one entry instead of spreading them out so we could squeeze more options into the final result.
Photo by Kairos Photo.
about:blank (Free, Browser-Independent)
In modern web browsers, typing
about:XXXprovides various information depending on what theXXXpart is. (For more on the variousabout:variables, gloss over this Wikipedia article.)about:blankis the universal code for "display a blank HTML document", and many Lifehacker readers prefer this as their start page—or anti-start page in a way!—because it fires up each session and new tab with a clean slate that doesn't use any unnecessary resources or bandwidth. It's fast and distraction-free.Fav4.org (Free, Web-Based)
Fav4 is probably the most elegant of the start pages featured here—not counting the extreme-minimalist approach of
about:blank. The arrangement is simple: You visit Fav4 and click on the customize gear in the lower right hand corner. From the customization menu, you can select your four favorite sites from the roster of provided sites or suggest a new site if they don't have one of your favorites. Drag and drop the four sites of your choice onto the customization side bar, and the sites will be displayed—as seen in the screenshot above—as four large icons in your browser window. You don't need to sign up to use the service—it saves your settings on a per-browser basis using cookies instead of requiring a login. Given how much of the average user's web traffic is directed at a small selection of sites, having only four sites in the bar isn't as restrictive as it would first seem.iGoogle/Google (Free, Web-Based)
Google made two appearances in this week's Hive Five on two distinct ends of the start page spectrum. For many, Google.com is their go-to search engine of choice, so it was natural to make the basic Google search portal their start page. Others love Google as a search tool but want more out of their start page, so they use iGoogle (see the screenshot above). iGoogle is Google's widget-based start page. Not only can you embed widgets for nearly every Google service—including Gtalk, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader—you can add in additional widgets from the extensiveiGoogle widget directory.
Chrome New Tab/Opera Speed Dial/Speed Dial for Firefox (Free, Browser-Dependent)
Thumbnail-based "speed dial" start pages have grown in popularity since Opera introduced Speed Dial two years ago. You can enable or install Speed Dial-style start pages in most popular browsers in a variety of ways. Opera set the stage for thumbnail-based start pages with the original Speed Dial, which allows you to specify up to 25 thumbnailed sites on your Speed Dial page for quick access. Google Chrome has its New Tab Page, which displays your most frequently accessed web pages as well as recently closed tabs (seen in the screenshot above). Finally, Speed Dial for Firefox is a Firefox extension which brings Opera-style Speed Dial to Firefox. It's not as polished in appearance as the actual offering from Opera or self-updating as the New Tab Page in Chrome, but it gets the job done. (You can actually find all kinds of Speed-Dial style extensions for Firefox, but this version is the one that garnered the most votes.)
Custom (Free, Browser-Independent)
While some people are content with the emptiness of
about:blankand others are content with the structure imposed upon them by using pre-designed start pages, a smaller but vocal minority of readers opted to build their own start pages from the ground up. Why be restricted to the form and function of a start page designed by someone else when you can build your own start page to fit your needs and tinker with it to make it as simple or complex as you need it? The start pages readers create vary as much as their HTML chops allow, but for a surprising amount of readers, the best start page is the one you design yourself and load as a local HTML document or save on your web server for personal use from anywhere you do your browsing.
