What Home Page Do You Use and Why?

I used iGoogle as my homepage for many years. A homepage is the page you "land" on when you open up your browser.

I never got comfortable with using traditional "feeds" and I liked the news-page feel of iGoogle. However, iGoogle has gone the way of the dinosaur and having never seriously examined options previously, I have been doing so for the last 2 months or so.

Some alternative homepage options include Netvibes, Protopage, and igHome, though this is not a comprehensive list.
First, I tried Netvibes but I found the instructions confusing. (Note: I find many detailed instructions confusing.) So I signed up but never got my homepage customized and up.
Next, I tried igHome which seemed at first to be an OK substitute for iGoogle though it lacked as many options for widgets as I would have liked.
Here are caps from my igHome page:


The most troubling aspect of igHome was how slow the page was to load. It was never fast but it has slowed down dramatically in the run up to iGoogle's demise and since it wasn't "perfect" for me anyway and I hadn't yet sampled every choice in home pages that I knew of, today I tried Protopage. I like it a lot. My homepage is not perfect (yet) but it is super-easy and intuitive to customize. The instructions are simple and clear. There are plenty of choices in widgets, including ones I went without using igHome and it loads fast.

Here are caps from my Protopage home page:


Do you use a home page? If so, what do you use and why? Have you tried other home pages? What were the pros and cons of using them? Why did you stop?

 

Waaaaayyyyy back in the day, I had a home page hand-coded in HTML3 with links to all of my favorite sites; MySpace, Neopets, Xanga, LiveJournal, YouTube, all of my e-mail sites... everything a young angst-riddled teenager needed.

Used iGoogle soon after I sold my soul to the supreme overlords and handed over my life and all of my information to The Google. That eventually became far too much for me to handle and I got overstimulated and wound up never using it.

Nowadays I don't even use a 'home page': most of the places that I want to go are hyperlinks that I have memorized or that pop up for me on Chrome's 'New Tab' page.

 

That is interesting @ThePriseinferno. I was wondering how many people have a similar set up as you--still using a Google product--Chrome browser but not iGoogle.
Not to go off-topic, but I'm not feeling the trust with Google as in January 2014, unless you know coding (which I don't) we won't be able to use Adblocker on Chrome browser.

 

Trust went out the window looooong ago. Now it's mostly just comfort.
As for Adblock, I don't really use it in the first place; I see ads as inconvenient but I don't see my life any 'better' without them. Besides, supporting stuff is cool.

On topic, I run a home server, and am strongly considering setting a homespun version of this to my homepage / newpage, in hopes that it'll help me get stuff done more efficiently: myTinyTodo - simple open source to-do list script written in PHP and jQuery

 

I have three tabs that open when I open my browser: Gmail, Feedly (my Google Reader replacement for RSS), and Google News

It's funny, I don't consider any of them my Home Page as such. I set them up to launch automatically because they are the ones I go to the most throughout the day (mail, RSS feeds, and News). I then manually open TFP, Facebook, and others. I don't like to keep them open all the time as I am at work.

I vaguely recall setting up a home page kind of thing about ten years ago, but I don't think I used it all that much.

 

I just use the Google homepage. It loads fast.
After that opens, I use it as a backdrop and open other windows over it. I don't like tabs.

 

I have Yahoo, only because that's where my email is.
I think Yahoo sucks, particularly the recent email "upgrade" which is awful.
Thanks for bringing this up, it may be enough to prod me in a new direction.

 

Gmail is really a much better webmail system.

 

Google. It opens up and it has links to all of my most frequently visited sites. I like that.

 

Holy flashback, Batman!


***

I just have the google homepage. It's uncluttered, and I like the occasional doodles for special days. When I open a new tab, Firefox's speed dial extension comes up, with nine pages I've set as "favorites." Basically the ones I visit most often.

 

Google. Its easy...

 

Have my homepage set to Google both at home and at work. Where go from there depends on what I'm up to. I do save my more popular sites as bookmark icons, and just click to those as needed.

 

That is very clean-looking, which IMO is a plus. But I agree, maybe a bit of home-spunness added to it might prompt more of an inclination to "engage" with it more often.
--- merged: Nov 11, 2013 at 2:46 PM ---
It seems that Google is a clear winner here and their decision to rid the Internet of iGoogle may have come because experienced users (a category I'm going to throw you all into) weren't using it.

As @ThePriseInferno stated, trust in Google went out the window long ago (for me, it was about 5 years ago when they tinkered with Page Rank and I ended up a big ($) loser).

Comfort and ease of use seems to be a big draw to the Google homepage (I also enjoy the doodle), then it seems folks are content with bookmarking, tabbing and using icons to get where they need to go.

I really hadn't realized how far out of the game I was in my old-school mentality of wanting everything--all my interests (news and work-centered) on one page to peruse much like a newspaper. But then "the newspaper" is going the way of the dodo bird, so that adds up as well.

I find with bookmarks that I keep adding them and end up with an unwieldy super-long list and I never seem to get to whatever it is I bookmarked--or months or a year later I forget why I did and so delete them.

Like @Fremen, I'm just not that fond of tabbing, specifically having more than a couple tabs open at one time. It may be due to what I call "clutterphobia"--to me, they distract from what I'm reading down below them.

Of the three, I probably prefer most to use icons in my browser. They have to be small in size or again, the clutterphobe in me gets distracted but they're handy and quick.

I guess the big point is that we have specific needs, likes and dislikes, and comfort or lack of it depending on what we do with our computers and how we do it.
It's interesting to hear what works best for you all.

 

I don't remember what my homepage is at home...I'm rarely on the computer at home.

At work it's the website of the University I work for. Exciting.

 

I don't have a home page, I have a home tab folder. Whenever I sit down at the computer, I open a new window, I right-click on the "HIT ME" folder and open all roughly two dozen tabs. They range from my email to Al Jazeera/CNN to gun/military blogs to DIY sites. It's pretty efficient in that once I click through the spread I've pretty much covered the bases on things I want to read. The bad part is sometimes I get sucked into the sites and waste half a day reading stuff from back in 2009.

But tabs are like pockets. And everybody love pockets. Except women's clothing designers and Buddhist monks.

 

I see the Opera speed dial folder.
No clue what Firefox uses....runs off to check....the standard google page. Hardly ever use it aside from Netflix and no desire to change that. Edit: I use firefox to download videos from youtube, that plugin to download flash and other web videos has been a wonderful thing.
Internet Explorer - The Alienware page I believe, but if that "browser" is opened there is generally some cursing directed at whoever made the page that makes me use that abomination to begin with.

edit 2: I use adblock on both Firefox (along with NoScript of course) and Opera.

--- merged: Nov 11, 2013 at 9:48 PM ---
For my google/wikipedia/ebay searches I just use "g/w/e <insert name of search item here>"

 

Google. I open Chrome and there it is.

At work, when the stupid IE browser opens, it opens to Stahl's psychopharmacology.
I didn't set it, but it's the only thing I like about IE.