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Sunday, January 22, 2012

Load The Homepage When Firefox Opens A New Tab

When you open a new tab in the Firefox browser you’ll notice that it always opens up blank. Mozilla announced plans to redesign the new tab page in an upcoming version of the browser, but for now blank is all you get. While tabs open fast because of this, it is for some users not the optimal solution, especially if they have one page that they open very often in new tabs.

Lets say you open Google or Bing search, Reddit or Hacker News more than 50% of the time when you open a new tab in Firefox. Instead of having to load the search engine manually you could simply use the My Homepage extension for Firefox to have the browser load the page automatically for you.

The add-on works automatically after installation and restart of the browser. Whatever you have set your homepage to will be loaded when you open a new tab in the browser. Keep in mind that this can also be quite irritating if you have it set to open a page that you have open all the time in the browser.

This works best for pages that either provide a functionality that you use often, or pages that are updated regularly.

Please note that this will only load the first homepage configured in the Firefox options. The extension ignores the | separator to load multiple homepages in the browser.

You sometimes may not want to open the homepage in the new tab. The developer has enabled the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-M for this. When you use the shortcut to open a new tab in Firefox, a blank page will be opened.

Firefox users can download My Homepage from the Mozilla Firefox add-ons repository.

If you are looking for something bigger, you may want to look at the New Tab King extension for Firefox which displays the most visited websites, recently closed tabs and other information when a new tab is opened in Firefox.



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