Productive Browser Homepage
Based on the post “Make about:blank Your Homepage” I thought I would share my own productivity tip that you can use your browser’s home page for.
I agree with Ionut Alex Chitu in that having a browser home page that connects to the internet is not a great thing. Especially in the following (my) situation:
VPN
Depending on day and time, I might be on a VPN, so I’ll need to enable my proxy.
When the browser starts, it will try and go to whatever home page you have set, and if you haven’t enabled/disabled the proxy, it fails, and that’s annoying.
Slow Internet
I’d LOVE to set my home page to a page like iGoogle with a whole bunch of gadgets giving me all the info I need.
But, the internet here in South Africa can be quite slow, even on a “broadband connection“.
So starting FireFox and sitting and waiting for a home page is not something I enjoy doing. My whole reason for USING FireFox is so that I can multi-task!
What homepage do I use?
I created my own home page. All it is is a local .html file containing all the links I need to get to the sites I use the most.
Here’s a screenshot of my home page:
As you can see, I’ve divided my links into different categories.
For example, the left column is all devoted to the app I support, and there are categories for the Production, Test, Dev and Local versions…
It loads just as quickly as about:home, but it makes my bookmarks easier to click. And I’ve set FireFox to open my home page when I open a new tab, so they’re always there.
