Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 98: Set Multiple Sites as Your Home Page

Level Easy

Platform All (with Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer 7+)

Cost Free

The advent of tabbed browsing enables web surfers to work with sets of pages rather than individual websites. You can set several web pages as your home page in tabbed browsers (such as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7) and bookmark and open sets of tabs.

Multitab Homepage

Say, for example, that when you launch your web browser, you look at three sites first thing: your Google Reader subscriptions, your Gmail account, and CNN. To make your three regular morning reads open automatically when you launch Firefox or IE7, set them as your home page.

Firefox

To set multiple home pages in Firefox, follow these steps:

1. Choose Firefox ⇒ Options ⇒ General.

2. In the Location(s) field of the Home Page section, enter the addresses of the sites separated by a pipe (|), as shown in Figure 10-15.

3. Alternatively, you can open all the web pages in tabs and then click the Use Current Pages button below the Location(s) field, also shown in Figure 10-15.

Figure 10-15: Separate multiple URLs with a pipe (|).

Chrome

To do the same thing in Chrome, perform the following:

1. Click the Wrench button ⇒ Options (Preferences on OS X).

2. In the On startup section, select Open the Following Pages, and click the Add button to add as many sites as you like, as shown in Figure ...