Although I use SpeedDial as my default start page for new tabs, I also like it when my browser loads with multiple tabs open on first launch. I usually check my email and read certain news sites, so when I open Chrome in the morning, it’s nice to see these two websites open automatically along with the browser in their own tabs.
In this article, I’ll show you how to set up multiple home pages to open in Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari. The process is slightly different depending on the browser, so I’ll cover all major browsers.
Google Chrome
Let’s start with Chrome as it is my favorite browser at the moment. The first thing you need to do to keep things simple is to simply open the various websites you want to load at startup in separate tabs. After opening the websites, click the options button with three horizontal lines at the top right.
Click on “Settings” at the bottom and a new tab will open in Chrome. You will see the “On Startup” section and you will need to select the “Open a specific page or set of pages” radio button. Then click on the “Install Pages” link.
In the pop-up that appears, you can now add a set of pages that you want to open at startup. You can enter each website manually or click the Use Current Pages button and it will automatically use the currently open tabs to populate the home pages. This is why I mentioned about opening websites in tabs before going into settings.
It should also be noted that web pages will load in the browser in the same order in which you enter them in the settings page. So the first tab will be the website on the first line, the second tab on the second line, and so on.
Fire fox
As with Chrome, you must first open web pages in Firefox before going to the settings page. Once you’ve downloaded them, click the same three horizontal bars in the upper right corner as in Chrome.
Go ahead and click the Options button and a popup will appear with the General tab selected by default. In the Startup section, you can customize the home pages. Make sure the When Firefox starts dropdown is set to Show my homepage.
You can now manually enter web addresses in the Home page field and separate each website with a | the character on the forward slash key or you can click Use Current Pages or Use Bookmark. Use Current Pages works the same as in Chrome, and Use Bookmarks lets you simply select sites from your bookmarks. Again, the order in which the items are listed in the tutorial corresponds to how they will open in tabs.
Internet browser
Follow the same procedure here and open the pages before continuing. In IE, you click the gear icon in the upper right corner and then select Internet Options.
A dialog box will appear and on the General tab you can click the Use Current button to quickly load the home page tabs, otherwise you will have to enter them manually, one on each line.
Also, under the Startup section, make sure the Start from home page radio button is selected. As with all other browsers, the order in the textbox is the order in which the tabs will be displayed.
Safari
Since Safari hasn’t been updated on Windows since version 5, I won’t even mention it here as no one in their right mind is probably using it. On a Mac, you first need to make Safari the active window and then click Safari – Preferences in the main navigation bar at the top of your screen.
This will bring up the settings dialog on the General tab. Safari is now the only browser that doesn’t follow the usual conventions and doesn’t let you just add multiple pages to a text box, etc. You will notice the Home page field and you can only specify one URL in it! So how can you even have multiple home pages with Safari?
Well, this looks a bit like hacking, but it works fine. Typically you will need to click the dropdown next to New Windows Opened With and select Select Tab Folder.
A pop-up window will appear in which you can select any folder stored in your bookmarks. Select the folder on the left and click the Select button.
Now when you open your browser, new tabs should appear on startup. So the main thing in Safari is to create a bookmarks folder, which you can do by clicking a button in the sidebar and then clicking Edit at the bottom. Make sure the left book icon is selected when you open the sidebar.
Now you can click the New Folder button at the bottom and then simply drag and drop links into that folder. You may need to visit the actual website first and bookmark it for it to appear on the list.
This is how you can customize multiple home pages in Safari, Chrome, IE, and Firefox. If you have questions or are using a different browser, let us know in the comments. Enjoy!
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