The home button & home page

When you start up Internet Explorer or Navigator for the first time, the browser loads a default page into the browser’s main window. In the case of Internet Explorer, it is Microsoft’s Home page, while with Navigator, it’s Netscape’s Home Page.

It is possible to change the home page that loads when you press the ‘Home’ button.

Select the ‘Internet Options’ command in the ‘View’ pull-down menu (or in the case of Navigator, the ‘Preferences’ command under the ‘Edit’ pill-down menu) and a smaller window opens up, offering a number of additional options.

In Explorer, select ‘General’ (the first option) and you will see three further sub-sections, namely ‘Home Page’, ‘Temporary Internet Files’ and ‘History’. It is only the ‘Home Page’ section that you are interested in.

You will see an address box under this section which contains the URL of your existing default home page. Should you wish to change your default home page then all you need to do is to change the URL in the address box.

With Netscape, you select the ‘Navigator’ option from the list on the left of this window, and then ‘Home Page’. As with Explorer, you now only need to change the URL in the address box to select a new default Home page.

Because this is the first page that is loaded into your browser’s main window and because it is also quickly accessible using your browser’s ‘Home’ button, it is worthwhile changing the default home page to a web page that is meaningful to you, such as the home page of a web site that represents a valuable gateway to information of interest to you, or the home page of one of the main search engines, or to a web page of your own creation. These cached elements may be reused several days or even weeks later when you revisit the web page. The problem with this is that in the meantime, certain elements on the web page may have changed and for this reason, pages are not always the most up-to-date.