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

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:

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?