Midori's default home page is not obviously the internet

[Danielle Foré]

Midori's default home page is currently elementaryos.org. While that's neato for people to see what's new with us, it's not particularly useful in reality.

The default home page needs to be more obviously "the internet".

Chrome's default page clearly indicates that you're using a "fast new browser" and has a quick overview of the basic interface.

Firefox's default page has a fatty google search bar, which makes it very obvious that we're on the internet at a glance

If I remember correctly, Safari defaults to a pre-populated Speed Dial which shows a bunch of the most popular sites on the web.

All of these are much clearer and more helpful than what we're doing, which is the equivalent of crappy advertising.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

I second this SO MUCH!!!

My old custom distros had a multi-engine search bar like http://go.infinise.com but I guess it's a bad idea because people get used to using it instead of the location bar and that causes nothing but inconvenience.

I'd also like to have a place in the OS where we can post important notices (like the one we did for Jupiter upgrading) in case something goes terribly wrong.

We could also post there calls for testing or fundraising notices, so the fundraising campaign reaches the people while they're actually using the OS - something I recall Adam Dingle of Yorba fame point out as effective practice (as illustrated by e.g. Wikipedia) but not really applicable to their products.

[Matthew Foulks (mfoulks1)]

Posted bounty for new start page at: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/447495-midori-s-default-home-page-is-not-obviously-the-internet

Github for new page is at: https://github.com/mfoulks3200/Elementary-Os-Browser-Start-Page

[Cassidy James Blaede (cassidyjames)]

This should be migrated to a web team issue on GitHub; the default start page is start.elementary.io which we can use to display whatever we want. :)

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Ran a poll and it sounds like Speed Dial is the most popular thing people set for their home page with "I never visit my home page" being a close second. I think it makes sense, would make it the same thing as the new tab page for simplicity.

This means we need to change the home page URL to "about:dial" in the default settings and then supply a populated default speed dial. I've got a speed dial file here with our support page plus some popular sites.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

Assigning Cody because I'm not sure where exactly to add a new file in the granite packaging branch