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In Firefox 3, can I have more than one home page?

Just downloaded Firefox 3 and it's awesome and I'm having fun customizing it. My quesiton for today: is there some way to have my "home" button take me to more than one page at a time? That is, I want to have the browser launch with a few tabs already set, for my email, schedule, and favorite news site. Doable?

Dave's Answer:

The more you dig into modern software, the more you find out it can do. Firefox is no different and I just checked, FF3 has the same slick (undocumented?) feature that earlier releases had: any bookmark can represent more than one page.

This means that you can actually bookmark a set of related pages or sites rather than just have the more pedestrian one bookmark = one Web page of other browsers.

You can crack the code by choosing Bookmarks --> Bookmark All Tabs if you want (which is an easy way to set this up, or you can do what I like, which is to enter things manually. :-)

Here's how I changed my home page in Firefox 3.0 to automatically open up Google Mail, Google Calendar and leave me an empty tab that I can use as needed.

First off, to get to the home page bookmark spot, go to Firefox --> Preferences... and click on the "Main" tab. It looks like this:

If you look closely at that screenshot you can see the secret. The URL shown is:

https://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox|https://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1|

The secret? Separate each entry with the "|" symbol (us Unix folk call this a "pipe symbol" but a lot of other people call it a "bar"). The leftmost URL is what'll be the first tab, and that's what'll be in the forefront. Since I end with a final "|" and no subsequent URL, that's what gets me an empty, "Untitled" browser tab.

You can build these yourself by hand, obviously. Just copy and paste the URL of a couple of your favorite pages, separating them with "|". Make sure that you've changed the pull-down menu option to be "When Firefox Starts: Show My Home Page".

That's all there is to it. Neato, eh?

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Categorized: Computer and Internet Basics (Article 8132)
Tagged: customing your browser, ff3, firefox 3, web browsing
Previous: How can I view PDF files within Firefox 3 (FF3)?
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Comments

Hi. Very cool trick.
Related to this; you can go into the Menu: Bookmarks>Organize Bookmarks. When you are there, make a New Folder (which might as well be named Favorties or something more relevant). Drag some of your favorite bookmarks into that folder.
This folder is now on your Bookmarks Toolbar. You can load all the bookmarks inside the folder with one right-click of the mouse: Open all in Tabs.
Safari has a very similar approach to this matter: Inside Bookmarks (hit the icon that looks like a book). Make a folder for your favorites and then mark: Auto Click. That makes all those bookmarks load when you start Safari.

[Thanks Dave. I am slowly reading one of your books, UNIX in 24 hours.]

Posted by: Sigurdur Armannsson at June 25, 2008 3:15 PM

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