362362 - offer selection for multi page home pages at startup

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[Jim]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

Hello,

This is a request to ask for a feature in firefox.

Currently when I use firefox i have about 12 URL's in my homepage(s) group.

When I start firefox it starts extremely slow because of this. I am aware of why this happens ... 

However I would like to suggest that instead of opening the all the home pages that firefox opens to a single page where I can then select home page groups that i would like to open.

For example on this single page I would see the options:

-[Quick Start]-
1.) Restore Previous Session (Firefox Provided)
2.) New Empty Session (Firefox Provided)

-[Open Group]-
3.) News (User Custom)
   - www.cbc.ca
   - www.google.ca/news
   - www.gnn.tv
4.) Weather (User Custom)
   - www.weather.ca
   - etc,etc
5.) Sports (User Custom)
   - ... 
6.) Email (User Custom)
   - ...
7.) Banking (User Custom)
   - ...

I think this would allow for much more effect use of Firefox. Every time I start my browser it is not normally for the same purpose ... I think others would benefit from this as well.

Cheers ... and you need help coding this ping me.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.)Start firefox
2.)See ugly "Restore Session"/"New Session Dialog"
3.) Say new session
4.)Wait for many homepages to load.



Actual Results:  
Wait to load sites ... then actually do what i need to.

Expected Results:  
1.) Start firefox
2.) Load one beautiful  default page quickly
3.) Pick some group of sites from a beautiful page to open ... or restore a session ... or start a new one.

Thanks!

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

You can get a sort of similar behavior through bookmarked folders:

1) pick some useful single home page (or blank, whatever)
2) put bookmark folders arranged by topics on your bookmark toolbar
3) fill folders categorized "home" pages
4) to open, click on folder icon, scroll to bottom and select "Open All in tabs"

The old suite (and probably SeaMonkey, though I haven't looked) supported actual tab groups, a flag that could be set on the folder that always simply opened them as a group in tabs. Then you can just click on the toolbar icon and boom -- there's your requested set of homepages. I can't find an equivalent enhancement request for Firefox so I'll confirm this one. That'd be useful.

Comment 2

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Hidden feature: if you control-click on the bookmark folder then the contents are opened in tabs.

Other than the fact that no one knows about the feature I think that's about as close to your request as you're going to get. No one's going to want to add a dialog people have to negotiate before they get to open their browser (absent an exceptional event like a crash).

So maybe this is "worksforme", other than the fact that no one is likely to discover this functionality.