Eight Start Page is free browser start page using which you can customize your browser start page. What Eight Start Page software does is that, it displays the start page of the browser screen in a nicely organized manner, which is in the form of bookmarked thumbnails on multiple screens. The thumbnails are website links which can be unique and user defined as well. It works with all the browsers.
Unlike other start pages we have reviewed earlier, Eight Start Page does not has anything to install. It is basically a HTML page that is locally stored on your PC and you can modify this page to have any websites that you want. Then you setup this local webpage as default start page of your browser to get a neat looking start page. However, modifying this start page is a bit tricky as it involves modifying source code file. So, if you have no idea about coding etc., you might want to stay away from it and instead go with traditional choices (my recent favorite is Fruumo). However, if you do like getting your hands dirty with the code and modifying the things as per your liking, then jump in!
See below, to get an idea of how the browser start up page looks like.
How To Set Up And Edit The Start Page Of The Browser:
- In order to Set up the Browser Start Page you have to follow the simple steps:-
- Get the Eight Start Page software (link at the bottom).
- Set Index file as the homepage of your browser. The Index file is a html file which is stored in the EIGHT-firefox start page+config folder.
- In Google Chrome you can do it under Settings – > On Start Up – > Open a specific page or set of pages – > Select the location of the Index File.
- After setting the index file as the homepage of your browser, you will be having the start up screen whenever you start your browser.
- To Edit the Browser Start Page you have to follow the simple steps:-
- Open the Source file located in the EIGHT-firefox start page+config folder. You can open the source file using the notepad text editor.
- After you open the source file you can edit the contents of the file. I have tested some of the features as described below:
- Set Number of Pages – You can set the number of pages from 1, 2 or 3.
- Edit or Change the bookmark – Here you can set the Title, URL and Thumb Image for the bookmark. I have changed the YouTube bookmarked thumbnail to digg thumbnail in the start page. You can see the images below to get an idea.
- To set your own thumb image you have to paste the image into the thumb folder. For the size of the image you can refer to the image file screen stored in the EIGHT-firefox start page+config folder.
User Interface Of Browser Start Page:
The user interface is really good and the browsing is really improved. You can use the mouse wheel to switch from one screen to another and visit the bookmarked webpage just with the click. There are no other options provided in the user interface as the start page acts just as bookmarks for Webpages and nothing else. See the image below to get an idea of the user interface of the Eight Start Page software.
Features of Eight Start Page Software:
- Neat interface.
- Browsing through pages is fast and good.
- Add or remove screens and bookmarks.
- 1 click access to websites.
- No registration required.
You can use another software to customize Start Page of Google Chrome: Incredible Start Page. It is a free plugin for Google Chrome that lets you customize start page of Google Chrome.
Conclusion:
The Eight Start Page is a great option to make the start page of the browser become really interesting. However setting a new page can be a bit tricky, so I won’t recommend it to the ones who are faint at heart. For others, go ahead and make this your own!
Try out Eight Start Page.
