For years I have used Yahoo! as my home page. It has a lot of nice features: stock market, latest business news, a pleasing layout that you can modify, and it isn’t too cluttered.   However, I’ve reached my limit with a particular hack Yahoo uses for it’s search field.  When you start typing anything in the Safari URL field, Yahoo! hijacks the focus and puts it in the Yahoo! search bar field.  Not only is this “feature” unwelcome, it is also so annoying that I’m dropping it from my life. The most frustrating thing about this javascript hijack is that it will grab your text in the middle of typing, leaving you with part of your se…
arch… in the URL field and the rest of it in the Yahoo! search bar. I have turned off all extensions and it still happens. There are plenty of other people who have complained about this hijack on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. The problem was I couldn’t find another page to replace it as my start page.  I recently have found 3 that I am investigating. Start.me, Protopage.com, and Netvibes.  Start.me is very customizable in terms of widgets and feeds, but it doesn’t seem to offer much in terms of color schemes and legibility options. The text is thin and bland.   Protopage has more customizable color schemes and text, and Netvibes I find to be a bit confusing and less intuitive for using widgets and settings to make it personal, although it has the best color scheme and layout.

None of them have some of the features I really appreciated in iGoogle pages, where I could follow and track all my web services and clients.  I recently talked to a Google employee who told me that the development teams are allowed to experiment in all sorts of different ways, but one problem that arises with all these experiments is a lack of coordination of the various services. I see a bit of that disconnectedness when I wish to tie my Webmaster account with my Analytics and my Adwords.  It is almost as if you need to sign out and sign in to the other parts of your account to access them. You don’t, but it is not seamless and intuitive.  With all the inventions, there is a lot of confusion.
Today, I’m setting Start.me as my home page and will try that for a week.