How to change your browser home page
in Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox.
Hi, everyone. I'm Leo Notenboom for askleo.com.
Today's question, "I upgraded my browser and I've always had MSN as my home page.
Now suddenly the MSN homepage is all changed and I hate it.
Can I change it back?
And if so, how do I do it?"
Well, there are two possibilities in situations like this.
It's very possible that MSN has changed the content of their homepage.
There's really nothing you can do about that.
If they redesign what you get to when you get to msn.com, that's what you get.
In rare cases, they sometimes will make an older version available for a while.
But in my experience, it's never permanent.
It does imply additional work for them.
And it is a case where it's probably better just to get used
to whatever the new page is or switch to something else.
And that's what this article is really all
about, how to set your home page in a different browser.
Now, let's talk first about what I mean by a home page.
In reality, there are three different
things that could be considered a home page or at least three different things
that you may or may not have the ability to set.
One is what's more commonly referred to as the startup page.
The startup page is the page
that the browser starts up to when you fire up the browser.
That's the page that opens automatically when you start.
The other is the home page.
This is the page that's brought up
by the home button that may or may not be displayed in your browsers toolbar.
And finally, there's the new tab page.
The new tab page, surprisingly,
is actually difficult to configure and is usually something that requires
an extension of some sort to get us the kind of control we often want.
So I'm not going to be talking about
the new tab page very much, but we will take a look at exactly how
to set your homepage and your Start-Up page in those three browsers.
Let's start. How to set the homepage in Microsoft Edge.
We'll start with Microsoft Edge.
Get going.
And you can see that it comes up to a page that is my home page,
that's what I have elected to set the start page to click on the ellipses
in the far right of the toolbar, click on Settings.
And then in the left hand column, click on on startup,
on startup, you have an opportunity to open a new tab, continue where you left
off, which some people may find useful, or you can open a specific page or pages.
You can set this a couple of different ways.
You can have it start up, use multiple pages and all you would
really do is add the URL of a page using this, add a page box.
However, you can see that I've already done this and set it to askleo.com.
The other approach is to use all open tabs, which means you would carefully set
up all the tabs you want to open automatically when you start up and then
go to the settings page and hit use all open tabs.
It would then set the start up set of pages to be all of the tabs that you
currently have open, except for, of course, the settings page itself.
Now that's only the start up page.
What we also want to set or at least play
with is the home button, which may or may not actually appear.
We'll head over to appearance and then we can scroll down to customize
toolbar where there is this option to show the home button.
I can turn it off & the home button disappears.
I prefer to have it on. When the home button is on,
what should it do?
You can have it do the new tab page
action, whatever that may be, or you can open a specific URL.
I again have it open askleo.com in all of my browsers.
I have the home button set to be the same thing as my start up pages.
If you like, you can have it be something different.
This is a quick shortcut that allows me
to just click this one button to get to a known location.
So, for example, if you wanted your browser
to automatically open to msn.com and you wanted the home button to take you
to msn.com, you would set both of those things to msn.com.
But that's it for Microsoft EDGE.
Setting these startup in homepages in Firefox. We'll fire up Firefox.
We'll click on the hamburger menu here on the far right and click on options.
Then click on Home in the Far Left.
Homepage and new windows,
they open a custom new URL, you have several choices here,
you can use the Firefox home, you could have a blank page come up or
like I said, a custom URL that you specify yourself.
You can use the current page or pages or
you can use a bookmark that you set previously.
I just set this to be a specific page
that I always go to when I click the home button, and that is this case.
askleo.com. New tabs in Firefox give you a little bit of customization,
but you'll notice that you do not have the option to set a specific URL.
You do need to get an extension to enable that kind of functionality.
Close the options tab and the settings saved.
Changing the startup and homepages
in Google Chrome. We'll fire up Google Chrome,
click on the three dots in the far right of the toolbar, click on Settings.
In this page, now you can scroll down until you find something that says
"On startup". On startup, we get to open a specific page or set of pages.
I will add a page.
I haven't set this one yet.
https://askleo.com because that's where I want to go on startup.
And now I have set the startup page for Google Chrome.
The home button is a separate setting,
so we'll end up scrolling back up to the appearance section where it says
Show Home Button that's currently disabled.
So we'll turn it on.
Now we have the option of either going
to the new tab page or entering a specific Web address.
Once again, I will type in my site's URL
and use that as my homepage for this example browser.
Unfortunately, in Google Chrome,
the new TAB page requires that you install an extension of some sort to configure it
beyond whatever Google Chrome defaults are. Close.
the Settings page and your home button
will now take you to the page you want to go to as your home page.
Homepages in your browser can change
for a couple of different reasons, some of which are unexpected.
In the cases that I've explained here, you have the opportunity to set or reset
your homepage in your browser whenever you want to.
Most often this happens when people set up
their browser for the first time or if something else unexpected happens.
There are a couple of scenarios.
One is you said yes.
You didn't realize, you said yes, but you said yes.
Probably while installing something else,
you may have been asked whether or not you would like to set your browsers home page
to something related to or promoted by whatever it was you were installing.
This is another reason why we so strongly
recommend always choosing custom when installing software and taking care
to look at all of the options that are presented when you do so.
If one of those is a setting for a home page, uncheck it.
Unless, of course, it's actually what you want.
Or if you suddenly find your home page
changed after an install, you now know how to go back and reset it.
Sometimes you weren't asked.
You didn't have the opportunity to say yes or no.
Some software is badly behaved.
Malware will sometimes do exactly that.
It will force your home page to be
something other than what you want it to be after you've removed the malware.
Now you know how to go back in and set the homepage to be what you want.
And finally,
just a reminder that sometimes it's not the home page that changed in the sense
that your browser configuration didn't change at all.
It's going to the same URL, msn.com in the example we started with,
it's what's shown on that page that has changed.
Maybe not to your liking, but it's still msn.com.
Now, you know how to choose a different Web site to be your home page.
If you find the result of that MSN dotcom
change undesirable, you can pick something else, maybe even askleo.com.
Now, one last thing I want to mention,
and this is an opportunity for you, if you've never set your browser homepage,
this is an opportunity to be more productive.
Chances are it's set to some default
that the browser provider decided was appropriate.
It may or may not be useful.
In Microsoft's case, it's probably MSN.
In Google's case, it's google.com.
In Firefox, they have their own custom home page.
If you like those. Great.
I view it as an opportunity.
I want something useful to be one
click away with that home button.
Think about how you use your browser.
Think about where you keep your links.
Think about where you spend the most time
and consider whether or not that should perhaps be your home page.
I hope this was helpful for updates,
for links for the article on which this video was originally based on.
Visit
askleo.com/14912
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.