new tab page

#10 My Yahoo

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My Yahoo - Personal dashboard

My Yahoo is a customizable web page with news, stock quotes, weather, and many other features. From all of the lists of New Tab Alternatives, it’s one of the oldest and most copied. Before the advent of the Google search page, it was surely one of the most important personalizable homepages. It’s still quite useful today.

Performance:
The loading speed is acceptable – though not very fast.

UX:
The user interface is clean and well designed. Rearranging your page content is done using drag and drop. Adding and removing content is easy, as well. All in all, My Yahoo provides an excellent user experience.

Are you looking for one place to go for updates from all of your favorite sites, blogs, scores, quotes, and other info? This version of a personal startpage is hugely customizable, and you can choose what you want to see.

Features:

  • Bookmarks
  • News
  • Stock quotes
  • Weather
  • Horoscopes
  • Custom Backgrounds

Export:
It’s not possible to export your bookmarks and feeds from your account.

Available for:
Web (all browsers)

Pricing:
Free to use.

Try My Yahoo now!

Myfav.es

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A little impression of a Myfav.es homepage

Now this is a simple version of the good old bookmark manager: Myfav.es. What I really like about this version is the simple homepage you get. Once you build it, you’re good to go. You can’t use it to bookmark sites when you’re surfing, so it’s really built as a launchpad. You can only add sites from their catalogue, so if you can’t find the site you’re looking for, you have to ask the good people at Myfav.es to add it. This seems kind of limiting to me, not to mention time-consuming. Still, if you’re looking for a fast page to start from, this might be your thing.

Performance of Myfav.es

This site does perform well. It loads fast, and you don’t even have to take my word on it. Google agrees. Still, since there is not much interaction possible, I didn’t expect any trouble here.

Main features Myfav.es

  • Fast interface
  • Simple, uncluttered design
  • Many sites to choose from
  • In the onboarding process, you get to choose from top sites in many categories
  • Options to display or disable search bar
  • Some background images possible
  • Choose your own icons
  • Styling of the preferences section feels outdated

Compatibility

You can access the site from any device, though it’s not really designed for a small screen. After you’ve set up your pages, they are easily clickable.

Pricing

There are no mentions of prices anywhere, which makes you wonder what’s going on here. Who’s paying for this service? In the privacy policy, they state: ‘This is free, harmless and fun, but here is a privacy policy that we found on Google, if it makes you feel better.’ Well, I’m afraid they should do better than this before I entrust them with my most personal surfing data.

Try it now!

igHome

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igHome

igHome tries to emulate and restore as much as possible of the old functionality and design of iGoogle (retired by Google in 2013).

Performance:
The website is a bit slow. Once you remove some of the default widgets and news feeds, it accelerates a bit.

UX:
There are a huge banner and a few lines of clutter on the bottom of the screen, other than that it’s mostly clean.

Edit processes are unnecessarily long and annoying. Adding widgets takes a long time, and even removing them takes too long (page has to be refreshed). Organizing bookmarks is impossible: can’t drag them or create categories. For a start page, I find this to be a big problem; The bookmarks auto-sort alphabetically. The color choices for most widgets are terrible and inconsistent, and the design is quite poor.

Features:

  • Bookmarking
  • RSS feeds
  • Lots of gadgets (e.g., weather, traffic, financial) to choose from

Export:
No export options for your bookmarks.

Available for:
All major platforms and browsers.

Pricing:
Free to use.

Try igHome now!

start.io

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start.io screenshot

start.io offers a simplistic start page with primary white links on a dark background, with some colored stripes for coloring. Simplicity above all else here.

Performance:
Slowness is apparent when adding bookmarks, when switching tabs, and when saving or modifying options. Start page access is fast.

UX:
Can’t get any cleaner than an empty page. It’s your bookmarks, nothing else. Superb.

The bookmarks setup is very straightforward. It’s comfortable to use, navigate, and modify. It’s separate from the start page, as an admin panel, so it doesn’t allow moving categories around the page & you have to use trial-and-error to make your start page look the way you want it. Not good. The worst part is that links open in the same window, not smart for a start page. A few other annoyances: if you accidentally click a category, all the other bookmarks disappear, and when you click the start page logo, you go to the admin panel instead of the start page. A few themes are available, but the option was quite hidden in the admin panel.

Features:
Just bookmarks. No widgets, RSS feeds, or any other options to fill your new tab page.

Export:
It’s possible to export your bookmarks.

Available for:
All major platforms and browsers

Pricing:
Free to use.

Try start.io now.

My Way

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My Way

My Way used to be a complete web portal and search engine like Yahoo!, but without any banners, pop-ups or spam. Since December 2015 the service has been disabled and replaced by another, much more simple version. Now you can use it to search Google through custom search and to click through to some key websites. It’s not a complete and customizable suit anymore, but you might want to take a look at it, none the less. 

Performance:
The loading speed of the new tab page is fast.

UX:
The company has taken a fundamental and minimalistic approach. It may work for some people, so try it out. 

Features:

  • Search bar
  • Bookmarks
  • Email

Export:
It’s not possible to export your bookmarks and feeds from your account.

Available for:
Web (all browsers)

Pricing:
Free to use.

Try My Way now!

Old My Way version, now discontinued.