"Start page," "home page," and "new tab page" get used like synonyms, and most people never notice they're three separate settings until one of them stops doing what they expect. All three are worth defining properly, because the differences explain a lot of what happened to the sites that used to live there, and what's worth using in their place today.
Start page, home page, new tab: three different things
A start page is whatever loads when you launch the browser from fully closed, a cold start. It's controlled by your browser's startup setting, usually a choice between a blank page, one specific URL, or picking up your previous tabs right where you left off. In Chrome and Edge, that setting is launch-only: opening a fresh window while the browser is already running shows the New Tab page instead, not your configured start page.
A home page is what loads when you click the Home button, the small house icon some browsers still show next to the address bar. In Chrome and Edge, that's a separate setting from startup, one most people configure once and never touch again, and plenty of people have turned the Home button off entirely without realizing the setting underneath it is still there. Firefox draws the line differently: its single "Homepage and new windows" setting covers the Home button and the startup page together, so the two-setting split described here collapses into one there.
A new tab page is whatever appears every time you press Ctrl+T or Cmd+T. It's usually the browser's own screen of shortcuts and thumbnails, but it can be swapped out for something else, typically by installing an extension built for exactly that.
All three can point at the same URL, or three completely different ones. In Chrome and Edge, the settings are independent; in Firefox, the start page and home page are the same setting, and only the new tab page is separate. Either way, that overlap is exactly why the terms get confused with each other: once you've landed on one, it looks identical to whatever page happens to be showing in the tab. What changes is how you got there.
| Term | Opens when | Set in |
|---|---|---|
| Start page | The browser launches from a cold start | Startup settings |
| Home page | You click the Home button | Home-button settings (Chrome, Edge) |
| New tab page | You open a new tab | New Tab settings, often via an extension |
That's the shape in Chrome and Edge. Firefox combines the first two rows into one "Homepage and new windows" setting, so check there first if you're on Firefox and only one of these seems to exist.
What start pages were for
Before "start page" meant a mostly blank new-tab screen, it meant something closer to a personal portal. Sites like iGoogle and Netvibes let you build one page out of small widgets: a weather box, a stock ticker, an inbox preview, a grid of RSS feeds pulling headlines in from wherever you pointed them. You set the result as your actual browser start page, and every time you opened the browser, that whole wall of information loaded before you did anything else.
The pitch made sense for its moment. Search engines were still catching up to being reliably good, so a page that pre-loaded the ten things you checked daily could genuinely save time over typing a query and picking through results. And most of what you wanted to check wasn't its own standalone app yet. Email lived in a browser tab, and so did nearly everything else worth checking: news, weather, sports scores, whatever your feeds pulled in. A portal start page wasn't competing against dedicated apps, because dedicated apps for most of that didn't really exist yet.
That's the part worth remembering before writing the whole category off as dated. The portal wasn't a workaround for anything. For a stretch of years, it was the most direct route to "everything in one place" that the web had on offer.
Why the classics kept shutting down
iGoogle shut down in 2013. Netvibes has, since then, wound down the free version of its consumer product, the one regular people used without a company card attached to it.
Neither closure needs a conspiracy theory to explain it, and the same two shifts run underneath both. Search got good enough that pre-loading ten links and hoping one of them was useful stopped being faster than typing three words into a search box. And the things people actually wanted to check, email, calendars, project boards, chat, moved off feeds and static widgets and into dedicated apps with their own notifications, their own logins, their own reasons to be opened as a full tab instead of glanced at inside a box.
A page built for skimming headlines doesn't have much left to offer once the things you check are apps you actually use, not summaries you skim past. That's the pattern across the whole portal category, not just these two names specifically: build a page to aggregate a web that ran on RSS and static links, and it runs out of good answers once the web it was built for moves on without it.
What people actually want now
Nobody's asking for that wall of widgets back, and it's worth being honest about why: feeds lost. RSS never fully disappeared, but it stopped being how most people track the things that matter to them day to day.
Ask most people what they actually check throughout the day and you get a short list, not a wall of links: email, a calendar, one or two chat tools, a project board, maybe a single news source they trust. Five or six things, at most, and every one of them is a full destination now, not a headline to glance at and move past. Nobody wants a summary of their inbox anymore. They want their inbox.
That's a different job than the old portal did. The portal's job was surfacing more than you'd ever click. The job now is holding the handful you already open every day, in the same place, so you stop hunting for them.
Start page vs dashboard
That shift in what people actually want is exactly where "start page" stops being the right word for some of today's tools, TulipLot included.
A start page, by definition, is a place you leave. You land there when the browser opens, click through to wherever you're actually going, and its job is done until you close the browser fully and launch it again. Even the old portals worked this way underneath the widgets: useful for the first thirty seconds, then out of the picture.
A dashboard is a place you stay. TulipLot is built as a fixed 3×2 grid, six cells, each holding one app, and instead of a launch pad, it works more like a permanent workspace. Free accounts get five usable cells plus an ad cell in the corner; Premium is $4 a month for all six cells with no ads. Free needs no credit card and has no time limit either way. Add a site from the catalog or paste any HTTPS link, and drag two cells to swap them whenever your routine shifts. The grid stays exactly where you left it, tomorrow and the week after, because you're not passing through it. You're working inside it, same layout, same six spots, every day.
That's the real distinction, and it has nothing to do with widgets versus apps. A start page hands you a launch pad and steps aside. A dashboard doesn't step aside. We wrote more about that choice in Why we built TulipLot, and if six fixed cells sounds like the wrong shape for how you compare things side by side, how to view multiple websites at once covers the other ways people handle that instead.
Do you still need one?
It depends entirely on your day, and it's worth answering honestly instead of assuming everyone needs the same setup.
If your actual routine is two sites, an inbox and one other tab, you don't need a start page, a dashboard, or anything layered on top of what your browser already does by default. Bookmark the two, or pin the tabs, and you're done. Adding a tool to manage two things solves a problem you don't have.
If you're checking five or six things all day, every day, and you keep catching yourself hunting through a pile of tabs to find the one you actually need, that's a different situation. A fixed layout, the same spot every time you look, beats re-finding the same handful of tabs over and over, day after day. At that point the apps aren't the problem. Where they live is.
Try TulipLot free, no credit card required, and see whether your five or six actually settle into a place that sticks.
Questions
What's the difference between a start page and a home page?
In Chrome and Edge, a start page loads when you launch the browser from fully closed, a cold start, controlled by the browser's startup setting, while a home page loads only when you click the dedicated Home button next to the address bar, a separate setting most people configure once and rarely revisit. Firefox is the exception: its single "Homepage and new windows" setting covers both, so there's no separate start-page setting to distinguish there. In Chrome and Edge, where the two settings are separate, they can still point at the same URL, which is part of why the terms get confused even though they're triggered by two different actions.
Is there a modern replacement for iGoogle?
Not really, not as a direct swap. Nothing aggregates feeds and widgets onto a single page quite the way iGoogle did, because the model it was built for, RSS boxes and headline skimming, isn't how most people track things anymore. What replaced it wasn't one site; it was a wider shift toward checking dedicated apps directly. If what you actually miss is the "everything in one place" feeling rather than the feed format itself, a fixed dashboard like TulipLot is the closer modern equivalent, holding your real apps instead of summaries of them.
Do I need an extension to use a start page?
No. Setting a start page is a native browser feature, built into every major browser's settings with no extension required. Some dashboard-style tools offer an optional extension for sites that actively resist being displayed inside another page, TulipLot's free Companion is one example, but that's a workaround for a specific slice of sites, not a requirement for using the tool at all.