One of my favorite features on Google’s Chrome browser is their “new tab” page. Open a new browser tab and at a glance there’s thumbnails of the most visited sites, recently closed tabs and recently created bookmarks. A very user friendly feature that I like and use a lot.
Granted, it can be a little embarrassing to see that the sites I visit the most aren’t necessarily productive (looking at Twitter for example…)
Firefox 3 has a feature that, at first, would seem to provide similar functionality in the “Most Visited” button. However, after using it for a while it turns out to be rather useless – for me at least. It doesn’t aggregate links by site so I end up with a most visited list full of various links into the same forums and web mail programs. Blah, that’s just not very helpful.
With the release of the latest Google Toolbar beta, however, we can now have that same New Tab page in Firefox that we get in Chrome. While I’m not a big fan of having to install additional toolbars this is one that I think I’ll keep around just to have that new tab feature.
Make the New Tab page your start page in Firefox
After installing the toolbar, browse to: chrome://google-toolbar/content/new-tab.html. Now, go to Options and set Home Page with the “Use Current Page” button.
Yeah really — just that simple.
Now my Firefox startup experience is like my Google Chrome experience – but with my favorite extensions. This rocks!
Final note: I’m still not a huge fun of giving up screen space to browser Toolbars. However with one of the toolbar Layout Options, this is no longer an issue. I’m using the bottom option in this picture:
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February 1st, 2009 
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WOW you made that hard.
Why not just CTRL T (or APPLE T if you’re a member of the elite) and then use that as the home page? You can drag the link to the little house icon on your toolbar, or at least that worked for me in the mac version. Trying to browse or open the link you gave to chrome://yada.yada.yada didn’t do anything for me. Maybe security settings prevented me from it? Not sure.
Ctrl T and then “Use Current Page” doesn’t work like that — at least not with my Windows version of Firefox. Instead, it dumps in the URL for the last “not-new-tab” tab that I was on.
I suppose that’s yet another difference between macs and windows versions of Firefox.
But its not for Chrome :/
Well huh – I hadn’t realized that there wasn’t a version of the Google Toolbar for Chrome yet. Seems an odd oversight, doesn’t it? Is there a version for Safari or Opera either though?
Granted, the “new tab” stuff this particular article is about is already built in.
Have been going thew Google Toolbar hell .
Tryed Beta , that took over everything – Removed downloaded 5 again no favorites and do not like Bookmark .
Removed , reloaded the old Toolbar , took 3 times now spellcheck dose not work . My Favoites are hidden. Went back to another restore point ~ what a mess . Any Clues how to repair this ?
Remove Google updater , this is a mess . Just add my Favorites I can live with V5 . Beta V6 forget it .One of those great Ideas that just domintaes and controls . I am not into S&M amd felt tied up .
Any idea how to make this the homepage in ie7?
That’s a very good question! I can’t seem to find an obvious way to accomplish that.
Yeah, me neither.These builders really are clueless about how people actually use browsers. I don’t open ie to view my “home” page. I open ie to visit any one of about a dozen sites. That site is almost never the same twice in a row.