New version of start.me released
Today we have released a new version of start.me. The new version comes with tons of great new features and enhancements to our user interface.
Release notes
New Pages menu
To accommodate the growing amount of pages that people use, we introduced a more compact Pages menu. You can open the pages menu by clicking the large button on the top left. The menu offers a nice search feature, that not only lets you search pages, but your bookmarks as well! To open the pages menu, there is a keyboard hotkey: Alt+Shift.
Custom icons for bookmarks
You can now change the icons of your bookmarks, by uploading your own custom icons (PNG, GIF, JPEG) or by selecting an icon in our our icon library.
Transparency for widgets
The transparency of widgets can now be configured per individual page, so that widgets will better blend with your background images.
New “Add Bookmarks” flow”
Adding bookmarks now requires one click less. Just click the ‘+Bookmarks’ button in the header and start entering your bookmarks. We also improved the detection of the page titles for your bookmarks: it’s quicker and more accurate.
New upload feature for images
Uploading images to start.me has become a lot easier. Use drag ‘n drop to upload your own background, icon or profile image. Even simply pasting an image you put on your clipboard is now possible. So if you find a nice background or icon on Google Images, simply copy and paste it.
RSS article preview
The RSS news widget now shows you a preview of an article upon hovering the headline.
We have a new logo!
For more detailed information about these changes, please read our BETA announcement post from last week.
Feedback
We love to hear your feedback about the new site. Please leave a comment below or contact us directly at support@start.me. Also let us know what features you’d like to see in our next release.
Help us by sharing start.me with the rest of world
Do you like what we’re doing and are you a happy user of start.me? Please help us by letting your friends know about start.me on Twitter or Facebook! Thank you in advance.
57 Replies to “New version of start.me released”
Hi Guys,
As of a few days ago, I’m having trouble with some of my links in my bookmarks. So far I’ve noticed that Adobe.com and ebay.com.au are being redirected through redirect.start.me for (I’m assuming) affiliate purposes. This actually breaks my links as we have content filtering at work and sites like http://www.tkqlhce.com are blocked.
Please don’t. Ads on the page is fine, they don’t interfere with the purpose of the start page. But redirecting links will break and will annoy people. I can’t use those links via start.me anymore which starts to render start.me useless.
Cheers! Olger
We are sorry to hear you are having problems with the redirect service we use for revenue purposes. As we like to keep the amount of ads on start.me to an absolute minimum, we rely on alternative sources of income, including affiliate programs. At the moment, we are not able to disable these programs on a per-account basis. As a last resort, you could use a URL-shortening service like bit.ly. Links generated by bit.ly are not affiliated, preventing the problems you reported. We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but hope you understand our position as well.
Is there a way, using the widgets, for me to embed a couple of personal photos into my start page?
(I’m away from my kids for a few weeks and would like a photo of them on the start screen.)
I’ve tried using the Embed Content widget and pointing the link to the photo’s location on my hard drive, but no dice.
If this functionality doesn’t exist, having a widget created to do this would be a great addition.
Cheers!
The flexibility was lost with this new upgrade. Anyway to get the pages on the top navigation? It went from ease of use to PITA. You guys have done some great work and I am all for change but only when there is a change that will make this product better.
Also anyway to disable the search bar? The browser bar allows that same ability in most cases so there is a redundancy. A great feature for those who like it but not a need for everyone.
Looking forward to a paid version with more features and goodies!
Don’t like the “new” start.me default home page at all. A blue moon and nothing else was fine. What’s worse is that I cannot get rid of all these silly “widgets.” Those of us who enjoyed the Pale Moon browser for its simplicity, basic appearance, and 64-bit speed are disappointed to have had these changes suddenly sprung on us. Not everyone is interested in reading “feeds” about the browser’s development, so this new start.me thing was a shock. If Moonchild is truly independent in its mission, allow users to shut off the clutter of start.me and allow a clean Pale Moon start page. If you are unwilling to allow users a choice, then you’re no better than Google and its sneaky, insidious hijacking of YouTube. I wonder…Was AdBlock Plus able to block the appearance of these silly widgets? Is that why you push AdBlock Latitude on us?
Hi,
Did you know you can completely customize the Pale Moon start page to your own liking? You can easily get rid of widgets that you don’t want. Use the “Customize” in the right top of the page enter the “Edit mode” of the start page.
Best regards,
Luuk
What about those of us who did not want to lose the ability to keep page links visible all the time? I had posted a comment here (which must not have been approved, because it was never posted) suggesting that an option be added to give us a choice to display page links in the top bar (option could be global or on a page-by-page basis).
To require us to click into the pages menu in order to switch pages is an extra click – I really don’t know why a process that was a straightforward one-click process was made to be two clicks instead. I do understand that a keystroke shortcut could work also, but again that work flow adds friction where it is not needed and not welcome.
I’d really appreciate an answer, please.
Rique
Hello Rique,
Thank you for your feedback.
We are looking into providing an optional shortcut bar with pages & websites. I’ll e-mail you a draft, so you can provide us your feedback on this.
Best regards,
Luuk
start.me
My “Page Menu” is way too wide. Any way to drag it across a bit thinner? I’d like to keep my “Page Menu” open all the time, but it’s just too wide. Cheers.
We are actually looking into this at the moment. I can’t guarantee anything at this stage, but I do expect us to reduce the width of the “Pages Menu” in the near future, in order to accommodate users who want to keep this menu “always open”.
I can’t login after your new release. With google account. What happened?
Hi,
Please e-mail us at support@start.me if you are still having problems accessing your account.
The widget transparency is a great idea. However, if using a dark background for the page you can’t really adjust the transparency of the widget … there’s no way to change the color of the font used for the widget and your left with black type against a dark background. It would be nice if it worked like windows desktop i.e., lighter font color on dark backgrounds and dark font color on light backgrounds — just a thought. On the whole, I’ve been impressed with StartMe from the day I downloaded it. Great job–thanks
Speakin’ bout font colors…
The mobile web is becoming a PITA – I think I won’t be using it for a while.
http://oi58.tinypic.com/fcr3nk.jpg
Thanks for sharing. We’ll fix this display issue on mobile devices ASAP.
Very nice, was looking for a personalized start page for some time. Very pleased with the customization options
Not so pleased with the loading times that seem to take for ever. If i open my browser, i do so, with the intent to access the internet today, not to wait till my browser loads my personalized start page. Hope this will be improved in the future.
Good to see the site is evolving, but is it possible to…
1. Allow pages to display at the top as previously, it’s less clicks.
2. Allow users to change the colours, not everyone likes mid grey!
Thanks
great set of new features. It would be nice if one could drag widgets from page to page
Thanks! You can actually drag widgets to other pages, if you like. Just drag a widget to the pages menu (the big button in the top left). Once you drop it there, you will be asked where you would like the widget to go.
Hello,
Great job on the new design.
One question though: is there a way to disable the new RSS preview functionality? I find it quite annoying.
It’s not possible to disable the news preview window. We have made some changes to this preview today. The preview window now only appears after a 1,5 second delay. Let us know if you still find it annoying.
The news preview is causing an issue on Android Chrome – I like to long press on articles I’m interested in reading in order to open them in a new tab, and the preview will not go away after the background tab is opened. Is there a way to disable or close the preview on touch interfaces?
This is a bug and will be fixed this week.
It’s much better. Thanks a bunch.
No need to being able to disable the preview anymore. Kudos.
Is there a way to disable the mouseover preview box? I understand it would be a useful feature for some, but it is a distraction for me. If an option to disable it already exists, I apologize for the oversight but I can’t find it.
It’s not possible to disable the news preview window. We have made some changes to this preview today. The preview window now only appears after a 1,5 second delay. Let us know if you still find it annoying.
Please, add an option to disable the feed preview. The mobile experience is really bad, almost useless.
Thanks.
The feed preview has now been disabled on mobile devices.
I love the idea but still annoying since it often gets in the way, popping up over the list of other things as you are glancing over the feeds. And worse it often conflicts with the hover over text (at least in Safari), so I get the preview partially covered by the other hover tip. As i said I like the idea and I hope you keep working on it, but please let us disable it while you work out the kinks. It has made the page much less appealing.
That’s definitely an improvement, but it seems like a problem the other way around now. 1,5 seconds night be a little too long. When you want to preview several rss links in a row it is way too much.
Nice design (the menu bar is a bit too wide for my taste). Major drawback is the loss of efficiency. Now we need two clicks instead of one to switch pages…
Actually, the menu bar mainly looks bigger. In reality the size difference is only 8 pixels (15%). By keeping the pages menu always open (click the button on the bottom of the menu), you will avoid having to click twice. Other suggestions: add a small block with links to other pages you frequently use to your pages. Furthermore, keyboard navigation may help you a lot. Just press Alt+Shift and type the first two or three letters of the page you want to open and. I myself have a lot of pages and find keyboard navigation very convenient.
But keeping the menu open takes up a lot of room and is not really a viable option on small-sized monitors. And having to use the keyboard can also break the workflow when you’re doing mouse-only operations, it’s the same problem as having to click twice.
I can’t tell for everyone, but for me there are only 2 or 3 pages that I use often and that I really would want to access in one click, I’m fine with the other ones staying in the menu. What would be great is to have a way to add links to your favorite pages in the top bar, just as the old top bar worked.
(forgot this bit) As for the small box with page links suggestion, that’s the solution I currently use, but it’s not the most practical one since you have to add this box to every page you make. And it can look out of place in some of your pages.
Everything is great guys with your commitment towards start.me.
If we can change color or shade also of our top bar then it would be really great.
Hi! Thanks for your kind words. To a small company like ours, recognition is a great thing. Changing the overall theme of the application (including the shade of the top bar) is on our wishlist. Currently, the top bar is a transparent dark grey, so the shade of it will change with the choice of your background image.
Why did you have to move the search box? This reminds me of how Google was always forcing changes on my igoogle page.
Hi Gene. Sorry about the search box. We had to move it, as we got complaints from people that it took up too much space. We were looking to solve this issue for over a year. You can consider the new location final and don’t have to expect any changes in the near future. How do you like the rest of it?
Hello can i dissable startme, its annoying if i cant then i will have to use another Browser, which will be a pity, as i have used Pale Moon for years. Thanks
Hi Iam. Of course, you can disable start.me in Pale Moon. You go to Options, and then set a different start page. That’s all. start.me is just a start page, so if don’t visit it in the browser, it’s gone. If you also want to remove a start.me account or extension, you can get more information here: https://support.start.me/hc/en-us/articles/200889632
Great improvements. I used to use My.Yahoo as my start page but you guys are 10x better. The new improvements were all on my “wish list”.
I’ve been telling everyone I know about this site.
Great job. Thanks
Thanks for spreading the word. We really appreciate that. A service like ours relies on happy users spreading the word, as we have virtually no marketing budget.
With these changes, start.me has moved from excellent to elegant on my scale of design. I don’t think of anything you could do to make it better, but I expect you will. 🙂
However, “fear the bloat.”
Thanks very much,
Philip
Thank you for your kind words! We are very afraid of ‘bloat’ as well. There are a lot of cool things we want to add to start.me, but without causing bloat. This new design offers us a lot of ways to integrate new things, without adding visual noise for those who don’t need the features. Our primary goal is to be a great personal start page. The rest is extra.
Finally! Glad to use the new version! Like the new logo but this blog’s favicon is light blue while the start.me’s favicon is some kinda industrial dark gray. Anyway, that cloud and the s, for some reason reminds me of old Skydrive, or something like that.
Oh, and I think the feed preview is quite fine — It just needs to load a lil bit faster and to be available in all feeds.
Also, icons at the Explore sidebar should bit just a lil smaller, so there’s no scrollbar.
And finally, the CSV file with sites & feeds for the Argentina area I sent Arjen a couple of days ago hasn’t been included yet in different categories. 🙁
That’s all my feedback for now.
Best regards and congrats with this new sm version!
Thats awesome… the design is perfect
The upload feature is working fine now. Alright! Good Job Guys! The new site, or upgrade of the old site, looks great!
Thanks a lot!
The ‘+Bookmarks’ feature seems to not be working yet.
A red banner with the text of Oops! Something went wrong. appears after clicking it.
The error message text shows in the dialog box when clicking the banner ‘TypeError: e.title is null’
Thank you for reporting this issue. We isolated the cause and believe to have fixed it. You should be able to add bookmarks again in a matter of minutes!
I clicked the ‘reload’ link in the error banner, and after the page reloaded the search box re-appeared. I had it disabled/hidden, on purpose, earlier, and that probably had something to do with the ‘+Bookmarks’ feature. The ‘+Bookmarks’ feature seems to work fine when the search box is available/visible (well the ‘add a bookmark’ dialog box appeared rather than the red error banner). I can’t find a setting to disable/hide the search box now.
Actually, this is just a coincidence, I think. The bookmarks issue got fixed more or less at the same time the search box was made a fixed part of the header.
I just restarted my browser and changed the start page from beta.start.me/… to start.me/… Is it possible to disable the search bar from re-showing after it’s been disabled? It’s not really a problem since the search bar doesn’t take up any screen real estate whether it’s there or not, but since I don’t need it, I don’t really want to see it.
I have DDG search bar next to the address bar in my browser. I kind of didn’t even want to see the start.me search bar, but I may find it useful. That box doesn’t take up any more area whether it’s there or not, and it may prove helpful to have two search bars readily available..
The search bar has become a fixed element of the layout. When you use the custom search feature, you will find we integrated some extra features into the search results page. In the future, we will add more features to both the search results page and the search box itself, better integrating results from start.me into the search feature.