Are you tired of the usual boring home page of your web browser? Yes, then you are in the right place. In this video, and with the open-source resources made available, you will learn how to change the start page of your browser and replace it with 3 types of super cool start pages. Really beautiful, useful and engaging.
Startpage is the world’s most private search engine (check it here!) but also the code name for the customization of the home page of the web browsers. You can find a lot of simple to use examples at the Custom Startpage Website.
A startpage (aka web browser’s home page) is the first default page you see when you open your browser. Usually is simple and static, but you can customize it with something more unique and useful. You must only make an HTML page (with CSS and JavaScript too!) and point the default home page option of your web browser to the address of that page. Nothing complicated!
How to set your brand new start page for your browser
To set your homepage and startup page on Google Chrome, at the top right, click More and then Settings. Under On startup, select Open the New Tab page, this to set the new tab page. By default, the new tab page shows Google’s logo, a search bar, and thumbnails of your most visited sites. You can choose a fun theme for your new tab page instead, though. To set a new home page, click More and then Settings. Under Appearance, turn on Show Home button. Below Show Home button, choose to use the New Tab page or a custom page. For more information, check the Google Chrome Info documentation.
In Mozilla Firefox you can set your homepage and new window page, click the Menu button and select Preferences. Then, click the Home panel and on the Homepage and new windows menu choose to use a custom URL. Unfortunately, you can’t use a custom URL for new tabs and you need an extension is needed to set this functionality, something like New Tab Override. For more information on how to set the home page and other parameters on Firefox check the official documentation on this page.
So, as example, you can download and/or clone our repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/cialu-net/startpages.git ~/.startpages #clone the repository into a hidden folder in home
Then, thinking of using the Terminal startpage, put this in your web browser start/home page custom URL field:
file:///home/<your-username>/.startpages/Terminal/index.html
In Windows systems, you must use the Windows path, something like:
file:///C:/<your-folder>/.startpages/Terminal/index.html
Sidenote – Windows does not use the dot-file convention for hidden files, so if you want to hide that folder, you need to do some additional steps.
- Right-click on the .startpages folder and click on Properties.
- Click on the General tab.
- Click on Hidden to hide the folder.
For the other web browsers on both Linux and Windows (and, obviously, on macOS too), the advice is to navigate through the menus to find the right option or go to check the necessary information directly in the respective official documentation.
If you also have certain laziness and do not want to work too much, you can safely rely on extensions that automatically modify your browser start page. As an example, we want to mention a very pretty one, it is Bonjourr – A minimalist and lightweight start page – and it is available both for Chrome and Firefox.
3 super cool and useful start pages for your Web browser
Now that we know how to change the start page of our browser, let’s try to use a simple, beautiful and useful one. Following our preferences and tastes, we have come to select 3 start pages from that incredible breeding ground of beautiful things that is Reddit and its dedicated group r/startpages.
All the 3 pages are fully opensource and free, we already made some modifications and uploaded the new versions to our repository.
Blue-Firefox is an amazing beautiful home page, also simple and useful. A minimalist start page born for Firefox with the Nord color pallette.
- Original Reddit post – https://www.reddit.com/r/startpages/comments/fxzaw8/my_first_experiment/
- Code repository – https://github.com/not-a-dev-stein/min-nord-firefox
Terminal, or term tree, is minimal start page inspired by the terminal console and colors. It is a basic term-like home page with tree structure.
- Original Reddit post – https://www.reddit.com/r/startpages/comments/f6hfoq/term_tree/
- Code repository – https://notabug.org/nytly/home
Manga is a nice home page made with bootstrap. It is simple, with search and links.
- Original Reddit post – https://www.reddit.com/r/startpages/comments/f1rkws/with_source_rebuild_because_creator_wont_share/
- Code repository – https://github.com/Tobias-Schoch/startpage2
We hope you like them because we find these 3 start page so beautiful and useful. Below you can also find the link to a repository with all 3 the start pages with little modification made by us. Enjoy that!
Resources
- Startpages | Some candy startpages for web browsers – https://github.com/cialu-net/Startpages
- Startpages | A sub for the viewing and discussion of custom startpages – https://www.reddit.com/r/startpages/
- Bonjourr | A fully minimalist and customizable startpage inspired by iOS – https://bonjourr.fr/