There are a number of options for start pages with modern web browsers these days – you can choose from your browser’s default, configure a set of your most visited sites as thumbnails, or even start with a blank page. Opera shows you a Speed Dial page where you can set up your favourite sites, Google Chrome shows you your most visited sites and your installed web apps on any new tab and Firefox has a great Speed Dial extension to mimic Opera’s functionality.
What if you wanted something that’s easier to use, portable and nicer to look at?
Myfav.es has the answer in the form of their free customizable web-based start page. The app allows you to put together a page with shortcuts to your favourite sites, which you can access with a simple URL. You can access this anywhere, configure it as your start page/New Tab page on any browser and get around the web quickly, no matter where you are.
Myfav.es started out as
fav4.org – a simple web app that allowed users to select any four of their favourite sites from their roster to allow one-click access to them via large, beautiful and easy-to-recognize buttons. The app slowly developed and blossomed into a much more full-featured offering, with a new URL as well.
You don’t even need to sign up to use it. If you do, however, you get a custom URL (such as myfav.es/username) that you can access wherever you go without worrying about cookies. You can sign up using your Facebook, Twitter, Google or OpenID account in a pinch. Once you’ve selected a URL to use, you can start adding sites to your start page.
My personal start page created using myfav.es
Getting started
Adding sites is a snap using the app’s tabbed interface. In the Add sites tab, you can pick from a list of top sites listed alphabetically. These cover news, finance, entertainment, social media networks, special interest sites, search engines and a number of major web apps.
The list is pretty long, so I’ll mention the sites I use on mine to give you an idea of what’s available:
Facebook,
Gmail,
Google Reader,
Twitter,
Deviantart,
IMDb,
Last.fm,
TED,
Tumblr and
Quora. There are plenty more so be prepared to spend a few minutes going through the options on offer. All you need to do to add these is to click the bar with the site you want and it gets added to your page instantly.
Adding sites to your start page
You’ll notice that I’ve mentioned a smaller number of sites than you can see in the screenshot of my personalized myfav.es page. The other buttons there are for custom sites, which you can configure by choosing to Create a Fave. Here, you can choose an icon for any site that you use which isn’t on the existing list, add the site URL and assign a color as well.
For example, I have a personal photography portfolio and an email address with my own domain, and I live in India. So, on my start page, I’ve added custom faves to access my website backend login page, my personal domain email login page,
Zomato (India-centric restaurant listings),
Flipkart (India-centric online bookstore) and
InvoiceBubble (a great free invoicing app that we’ve reviewed
here before).
You can even use the same icon for multiple sites, such as the email icon – just change the color to help differentiate between the two.
Creating a Fave is simple
Once you’re done adding all your sites, you can see them in a list in the order they’ll appear on your start page on clicking My Faves. Here, you can check the list, drag and drop to re-order sites and drag sites you don’t want to the trash section at the bottom of the list to remove them.
Customization
There are a huge number of options for customizing your myfav.es page:
Layout
Choose how you want your icons displayed on your start page: in a single row multipage (a few icons displayed per page; click the left or right arrows to see the next set) or single row magic scroll (icons follow your mouse), or in a grid. I find that for ease of use on smaller monitors, a grid is the way to go; you can see a large number of icons all at once.
Icon style
Choose between a matte or glossy effect and select a type of shadow/reflection for all your site icons.
Background
Choose from Classic (light or dark gradient), a selection of natural woods, elegant gradient glows, sleek metallic gradients and solid colors (you can use a full hex color picker for this) for your start page background. You can even preview the background in action while you’re customizing it!
Preferences
This is where you can really get deep – you can choose to add a search box to your start page, set the search engine to be used and the position of the box as well. Want to have your cursor focused in the search box to begin with? You got it. There are also icon options to play with (icons open in new window, lock icon positions or allow sorting on homepage, select right-click event), and enable/disable keyboard shortcuts.
Myfaves has plenty of options for customization.
Click on My Account and add your Google login details to get unread message counter badges for Gmail and Google Reader.
Using myfav.es
Whew! That’s a lot of options to go through! Fortunately, the app is very well-designed and configuring everything doesn’t feel tedious. Once you’ve got it all set up, you can set your custom URL as your browser’s start page. You can also pin your myfav.es page as an app tab in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox 4 so it stays accessible while taking up minimum space on your browser’s tab bar.
If you set your URL as public, you can access it on other devices as well. I personally use my page at home and at work. This saves me a lot of time typing out URLs for sites I frequent. Plus, if you’ve got elderly parents, you can set up a myfav.es page for them to easily access their email, news and shopping sites. I’d also recommend setting up a separate myfav.es page for your mobile device – you can select popular services (Facebook, Gmail, etc.) and edit the site URLs in the My Faves tab and change them to the mobile site URLs.
Final Thoughts
Myfav.es is easily one of the best start page options out there – it’s highly customizable, portable, fast and free. The ability to access it on multiple devices allows you to start browsing as you would at your primary computer instantly.
You can always login and make changes if your browsing habits change. Plus, the sites I’ve configured act as an at-a-glance to-do list – they remind me to check my work email, update my website, follow up on my payments and so on.I highly recommend this app as the first thing to add to any browser you use.
