LinLog

Today's Daily Grind had a link to Tim Haines's thoughts on why he doesn't use Live.com as his home page. I've only looked briefly at Live.com, but I have to say I tend to agree with Tim. However, my real question is, do people actually still use home pages?

I haven't really used home pages in quite a while. My homepage on my home PC is still set to Yahoo! mail, despite the fact that I bought a domain two years ago and now only check it once every couple of weeks. At work, I never even bothered to set a home page. You know why? Because I'm an Opera user, and I configured by browser to always restore my last session. So, in other words, I never actually see my home page. I just open up my browser and immediately pick up where I left off last time.

Apparently, from Tim's informal poll, there are a fair percentage of people who have their browser start on a search page, like Google. I don't know why, though. Opera and Firefox both support configurable inline searches in the address bar, after all. When I want to search Google, I just open a new tab and type "g search term" to run my search. I also set up "define word" and "wiki search term" to search Dictionary.com and Wikipedia in the same way. It's so convenient I honestly don't know how anyone can go back to actually visiting the main search page after discovering this.