Three Alternatives to Your iGoogle Home Page - hubbardhithorable

For as foresightful as I can remember, iGoogle has been my home paginate. I've used it for everything from monitoring my favorite blogs and news sites to tracking the number of days since I finally added salt to my water softener.

Sol it came as something of a shock to read that iGoogle is going away on Nov 1, 2022. That's only 16 months from now, barely enough clock time to vet a replacing.

I kid, I kid — that's to a higher degree enough time. The interrogative is, where should you flow your home-page lid? What should be the best thing that appears when you open your browser? I've got three suggestions:

MSN or Yahoo

Same to scan news headlines? Then you can't fail with MSN surgery Yahoo, which bring you the latest stories followed by sections equivalent sports, entertainment, local news show, and money.

You don't need an account with either service to capitalise of their portals, though sign language ahead for one nets you an extra netmail address and, in the case of Yahoo, some customization options for your home base page (including what mental object appears and where).

Personally, I believe Yahoo is the ameliorate of the ii pages, but you'll definitely want to browse both to see which one suits you best.

NetVibes

This old-civilis Web portal site has reinvented itself as a Web-analytics tool for businesses, but information technology still offers a consumer-genial custom dashboard where you can monitor every last the media that's important to you: news, email, tweets, tasks, status updates, and so on.

Where NetVibes excels is in rental you pick the "apps" (i.e. widgets) you want to include, then organizing them to your liking. For example, you throne choose the count of columns you need for your splashboard and how you want them arranged.

There's also a Reader mode that's great if you add a lot of RSS feeds. All told, NetVibes in all likelihood comes closest to replacing the appear and feel of iGoogle.

Cypher

Nothing? If you're not a news addict and wear't tend to look at RSS feeds and the likes of, you might just prefer to provide your browser without a traditional interior page.

To it end, all the major browsers now bear the option of starting you with a "blank" tab, united that doesn't unconstricted a particular page but does show thumbnails of your most visited/most popular sites.

You can too automatically open three-fold sites in multiple tabs, which is helpful if you like to bulge all browse session with, enunciat, Personal computer World, Facebook, and a favorite web log. Scarce open the tabs you want to re-emerge, then venture into the settings and choose "use current" for your home page. (The latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all let you load three-fold pages at startup.)

Your Nibble?

Those are, of course, just three options out of many. If you've found another portal, domestic-page, or browser-inauguration selection you wish better, tell me well-nig IT in the comments.

Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes almost business and consumer technology. Invite helper with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com, or judge the care for trove of helpful folk in the PC Domain Community Forums. Sign up to have the Bother-Gratuitous PC newssheet e-armoured to you for each one week.