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What Is Your Homepage?

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With any modern web browser, you don’t just have to choose one homepage every time you open your browser. The ability to have multiple tabs opened means that you can have multiple homepages all of the time.

My current default web browser is Google Chrome.

Here are my default homepages:

  • Google Reader – feeds, feeds and more feeds. From Blogs and news to some great websites I would never have the chance to visit frequently enough. Google Reader helps keep me informed.
  • Twitter – though I wish I could have multiple accounts opened at once (yes, I use TweetDeck as well), taking a quick glance at my Twitter feed enables me to see if something is brewing or breaking in the world.
  • Facebook – with over 200 million people connected, Facebook is my primary online social network.
  • Six Pixels of Separation – this gives me the ability to look at the comments and wonder how I can add more value.
  • Google News – this page is customized to my interests, so it includes sections on marketing, international business and some more obscure news searches like "Montreal" and my own name. With the aggregation power of Google News, it’s hard to feel like you’re out of loop with what’s going on in the world after a quick glance.
  • Techmeme – there are many great technology Blogs, but Techmeme seems to have not only the most recent breaking news and insights, but it’s also got some great links. It is an amazing technology news aggregator.

Those are my six tabs that are on my homepage.

What’s on your homepage?

25 comments

  1. Hey Mitch,
    I use Google Chrome as main browser and homepage iGoogle – it has my Google news, Google Reader, Weather, New York Times and more.
    But I like your suggestion of adding Facebook and Twitter to the start, as I will visit those pages regardless.
    Alex “iGoogle” Ikonn

  3. I use iGoogle as my homepage. It has Google Reader, Flickr Interestingness photos, the weather, and all sorts of other great stuff on it that I find extremely useful.

  5. Since the first time I started using web browsers I’ve always gone in immediately upon installing and specified no home page at all. When I open up a browser (currently almost always Safari) I get a blank white page. Very zen, I suppose!

  6. I just use Google Chrome’s “new tab” page, which keeps track of all my most frequently used pages. (Gmail. Facebook, Twitter, Scotiabank, PizzaHut.ca)
    That way if I need to open my browser for just a quick search, I can avoid my computer having to process multiple requests and speed things along.

  7. Just six? Now that so many sites have favicons, I delete the properties in the tab and have 25+ across the top of the page (firefox) and work through those throughout the day (Google, Typepad, Flickr, wordpress blog, ning group, etc)

  8. MyYahoo. At-a-glance, customized view of my email, news headlines, RSS feeds, calendar, birthday reminders, stock quotes, weather, and sports scores.
    It’s sort of the equivalent of what starting the day with coffee and a newspaper was to our parents’ generation, I suppose.

  11. I use google as my home page. It seems kidnd of silly since Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Safari are all set to default to google search. Come to think of it, I am going to change my homepage now..

  13. Default page used to be the home page of our corporate intranet. But now in Safari 4 (beta), my default is the Top Site page (sort of dashboard) in the 4 x 3 format. So I’ve got the 12 sites I visit the most in that view (our website, my blog, intranet, Twitter, FB, delicious and a few news sites).

  15. I use Safari and Firefox at the same time. I have CoTweet in two tabs in Safari. Firefox houses my random searching from NetNewsWire RSS feeds. I don’t have any extra tabs open because they’re all bookmarklets that mostly feed to other services.
    Mandatory in my firefox and in my world are the delicious “stumble” bar (randomly stumbles on new delicious content), [url shorteners: kl.am, bit.ly], hootsuite (CRM), friendfeed, [tumble sites: soup, tumblr, dropular], and tagulus.
    Of course I don’t use all of them, but they are always there. And everything else kept to bare minimum.

  16. I have Highrise HQ, Business Gmail, Personal Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader as my home pages.
    I don’t have Twitter.com open because I use the TwitterFox extension that I can access on every tab.
    (And I thought I should note, in your spam filter it says “letter on the left” but the letter is on the right for me)

  17. I use Safari 4 for browsing and Firefox for blogging (it deals better with WordPress.) My homepage is Google, not iGoogle but just Google. I like the cleanliness, I don’t need more distractions. Safari has this new feature where you can see 12 screens of the sites you use the most, I have Google, LwEEs.com, FaceBook, FriendFeed, and Twitter, just to name a few. This gives you a trendy overview of what I’m up to. Cheers, Luis

  19. I use both Chrome and Firefox and my “homepage” is my private Netvibes page.
    The main page contains my gmail accounts, calendar, to-do lists, twitter feeds and any stocks I may watching.
    Alternate tabs sort feeds by category. Sort of a “At A Glance” approach.

  20. Firefox / Google.com. Been that way for as long as I can remember and don’t think I’ll ever change, either. I just like Firefox’s AdBlock and extensions too much.

  21. I prefer netvibes to Google Reader – you can view full sites within a frame which is by far the best feature. Feeds are great but instead of having 50 new tabs/windows open why not just read the article directly in side a frame.
    You can check out my public page here: http://www.netvibes.com/riks311#Blogging

  22. I use New Tab King on firefox and it pretty much gives me everything I need from a homepage: most visited sites, recently closed tabs, shortcuts to applications, and there’s more…

  23. Thanks a lot. I didn’t know that you could use multiple pages as the home page. I use Mozilla Firefox and will reconfigure it. Thanks for the post.

  24. It is nice to see solid statements made by many like this slogan; turn your website into a money machine, make it highly profitable and with maximum ROI, but I do not think it is that easy. We also have to consider that many websites are equally important even if not designed or meant to be money machines. Examples can be governmental websites with information to the citizens and similar communication obligations. The approach is different from a 100 % business website but must be equally interesting to produce and maintain. One should however not forget that a website is a window only and it is important to know what is behind the façade. It is again a very important issue to master the art of changing the client’s dreams and visions into reality.

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