Have you ever had something urgent to do, fire up your web browser, then get totally sidetracked by something on your browser’s default home page? I do. Or, I should say, I did, and quite often.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had some sort of news portal as my start page. Back in the day, it was a Yahoo! page, and more recently it was a Google page personalized with several news and RSS feeds. It didn’t contain “fluff” like comics or a joke of the day; instead, it was local news headlines, finance stuff and a few tech RSS feeds. But often, too often, I would see a tantalizing headline or link that would divert my attention from the task at hand.
The worst type of distraction would be when I had a really good idea about how to fix a nagging defect or a way to make a page’s layout flow easier, only to forget what it was after getting five minutes deep into the latest breaking news story. Not only did I lose the five minutes I spent reading the story, I lost the incalculable amount of time it took to remember what it was I was thinking of earlier.
Then one day, just after a Firefox upgrade, it dawned on me: Get rid of the start page. After Firefox is updated, it shows a splash screen telling you about the update. Your normal start page is opened in another tab, but it was hidden by the splash. Since I wasn’t bombarded by Google’s personalized start page, I had no opportunity to lose focus. The answer was clear: don’t use Google’s personalized start page.
I then started thinking of a “proper” start page. Perhaps the home page for my site? No, a single out-of-place pixel would eventually start screaming at me to fix it, causing the same problems as the Google start page. I started thinking about posting a blank page to my site, and point to that, but that triggered something from my memory. Blank.
Both Firefox and IE have a special page called ‘about:blank’ that displays, as you might have guessed, a blank page. I set my home page to be about:blank, and now I’m greeted by a blank page that has no content whatsoever to steal my time. It doesn’t even hit a server.
The fact that about:blank doesn’t hit a server reveals a pleasant side-effect: starting the browser is now quicker. Granted, it’s not showing anything, and to get to where I want to go I have to select a bookmark, do a search or enter something in the address bar, which takes a bit more time. But it’s the page I want to see, and without distraction.
To set Firefox to open with a blank page, go to the Tools menu and select “Options…”. If it’s not already selected, click on the “Main” icon. In the dropdown labeled “When Firefox Starts”, select “Show a blank page”. Doing this allows you still set a certain page as your home page, allowing quick access by hitting Alt+Home.
The instructions are similar for IE. Select “Internet Options” from the Tools menu (or from the Control Panel), and click the ‘Use Blank’ button.
Tags: focus, web browsing