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My Browser "Startup" Folders

1/19/2025 8:42 pm | Share to:

This blog post refers to Magic: The Gathering. As noted, it is also now my job. So while I deeply love the game, I always want to alert folks I also have a bias.

Last weekend, I talked about my Firefox plugins. This weekend, I want to share how I use the browser, and one of the big step forwards for me.

In the 1990s, when dial-up internet was still in its infancy, my family was connected and (like today) my favorite game ever, Magic: The Gathering, gave me a very good reason to be online. I had discovered IRC, Internet Relay Chat. And specifically, I had found #mtg on "Efnet." It was a chatroom that could have up to 100 people in it on busy days. It was the virtual hangout for us. And that hangout, made it so I came home from school, and I got on the family computer, and I hung out for hours each day.

Remember, this was the origins of the Internet. This was back when kids were sent out of the house by default. Though that era rapidly came to a close. And this was the era when Internet access was metered. So, when one month I took the family over our 100 hours of online time in a month, it was a big deal and one I got into a bit of trouble when the parents saw my online time in a quantifiable way.

I share this tidbit from my past to show that my Internet addiction started early. My grandmother smoked her first cigarette when she was like 7. I started being online when I was 14.

These days, I wouldn't be shocked to learn I had weeks where I spent 100 hours a WEEK online, between work and home. Basically in my life, I have always been online. And it's been because of what is now my employer: Magic: The Gathering.

This entire story is to highlight how serious I take being online. I live in the browser window. Firefox is my workshop.

I used to agonize over finding the most productive or efficient start page for my browser. During Yahoo's heyday, had a feature which let you setup a custom start page on their site. Embedding weather, news, bookmarks, etc. Start pages have gone out of vogue, but I still want to be efficient and online as quick as possible.

I have a handful of pinned tabs which I keep always open in the browser:

My Pinned Default Tabs

But those are all personal stuff for me and not for work. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't let you customize start pages by the tab container (one of the extensions I talked about last week). My solution is instead to maintain "Startup" bookmark folders. One folder for personal, one for work. I bookmark the tabs I want into each folder.

For work, I won't tell you what tabs I use, but I have settled on 3 tabs which I keep in the Work startup folder.

So if I need to start my Work browser system, I open a new tab with the 'Work' container in the browser. So all of those tabs are using work related logins and cookies, etc. Then I can right click on the 'Startup' folder and open all of the bookmarks into their tabs, and boom - I'm off to the races.