Anecdote about about:blank: When I worked in a pc repair shop, when I set up new computers I always configured the browser (back in the day this was IE 6 and older) to start with about:blank because it just starts faster without having to load the MSN website or whatever. At some point my boss told me to stop doing that because customers thought the internet wasn't working.
Well, as a repair worker you're also not really supposed to mess with settings that are frankly purely subjective (yes, about:blank loads faster, but if people want to always go to MSN first, you've just increased the time and friction to get there), and have nothing to do with whatever problem people came to see you about.
Yeah that’s reasonable. I’m confused at the kind of customers you guys had though. Even my parents (tech illiterate baby boomers) know enough basic PC knowledge to try to type “www.google.com” into the address bar to determine if they have internet.
Can't speak for those customers, but I know people today, younger than 35 who think whatever is set to the homepage IS the internet.
Some had Google as their homepage. Some Facebook.
I learned this when they would be like "Josh, the internet is down, can you help me?" and I'm like wahhhhh? Come to find out Facebook had an outage. "I just opened the internet and its not working". :facepalm:
I get calls for this at least once a week. "Computer is slow/down" or "internet not working" when really the corporate partner's homepage is having issues. (Usually when everybody is sending in their orders for the week.)
When I worked at Yahoo! (2003-2005), Yahoo! Search would bring up a second search box under the primary search box in the results if people searched for Google, as a not insignificant number of people would start their browser, have Yahoo as their homepage, yet enter "Google" in the search box when they wanted to search for something.
Supposedly the second search box in the results fooled a substantial proportion of those people into entering their search term rather than clicking through to Google.
That is the level of tech illiterate users many people had to deal with back when IE 6 was a current browser.
I generally agree - a new tab should, for the most part, be distraction-free.
However, with some cleverness, you can add content to the new tab page that adds value - e.g. AnkiTab (https://github.com/corollari/ankiTab) to help you review your decks. Sure, it's a minor distraction, but it's time-bounded (unlike a news feed), and theoretically it's a net gain if your decks contain knowledge that's genuinely useful to you.
About blank is too white for me, so I simply removed everything from a speeddial except background. Bookmarks bar folders are my friends. Docs, prod.sites, dev.links, localhost:8000, services, music - all is right there. It also saves one click compared to speeddial.
Would be nice if it could be configured to live on a sidebar, and a checkbox for each bookmark to always open in a new tab. But you can’t get everything you want, I guess.
