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Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

Only marginally related: how often do people use the "home" button on their browsers? Is it fair to hypothesize "never"?

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I use it all the time, my homepage is a little document I have in my dropbox with a search box and links to all the sites I commonly visit.

A bit redundant these days perhaps, but it still works for me.

Redundant only if you use just 1 browser. Second: it's a piece of personal art (pop-art).

In chrome, I have unchecked "always show my bookmarks toolbar" such that my home screen is my top-8 as well as my bookmarks toolbar. I use it all the time if I want to recycle a tab instead of opening a new one.

I never saw that feature where when you hide the bookmarks toolbar, it comes up on the new tab page. Vertical space reclaimed!

In Google Chrome, the new tab page is actually quite useful, so I use the home button all the time.

I usually open a new tab when I want that page, instead of clicking the home button. Often closing the current page and opening a new one just to get to it. A bit inneficient now that I think about it, but I don't think I'd mind to see it gone.

The home button on the Steam client, otoh, I click fairly often. I guess it's because it doesn't have an URL bar.

I use it all the time to get back to iGoogle, which is my starting point about 60% of the time.

EDIT: Correction, I don't click the actual home button, but I execute the same command with a mouse gesture (via the unfortunately named StrokeIt).

It's a never in my world. My "Home" page is usually a blank screen, and with FF I customize my tool bar never to show the "Refresh", "Stop", "Home" and "Go", and the "Search" box (Essentially my URL address bar stretching almost end to end. I do have the Back-Forward buttons on display, but I never use those either)

The little features of the FF buttons work well for me, though.

For example, you don't need a New Tab button (it's not enabled by default anyway) - middle-click the Home button instead.

And if I want to create a new tab with the current URL, I middle-click the Refresh button.

You don't need to middle-click the Home button, press Ctrl-T instead. :)

Corporate Intranets usually have Home bound to some Kiosk style information page. This is the starting point for most corporate application journeys in this setup.

So it can be quite useful for staff to got straight to the Homepage no matter whose terminal they are sitting at.

My "home" button is set to google.com, and I use it a LOT. I started doing this in 1998 or 1999 and never got used to using the special search input that most browsers have by default now; I finally just turned it off to reduce clutter.

I use home button to open the Google homepage whenever I need to close all tabs in browser without closing the browser itself. So the Google homepage in that opened tab is like a placeholder. Anyway, I have no specific reason for doing this - it's just a habit.

I noticed a coworker clicking it all the time to get to Google to search for something. It drives me crazy all the time because he should have just typed in the search query in the URL bar.

He doesn't get to see the cool doodles then, though.

I use "home" all the time in conjunction with middle-click. Google is my home page, so when I middle-click on the home icon I get a new tab, ready to search.

You actually type searches into a text box on a webpage?

Why not use the search box in your browser? In Chrome the address bar is a search box.

You actually type searches into a text box on a webpage?

I figured someone might mention this, and probably make me sound like a Luddite in the process. :-) The short answer is that I use both. If I'm at the keyboard, I will do command-T command-K to use the search box in a new tab, but often I'm using the mouse, in which case middle-click home is more convenient.

In Chrome the address bar is a search box.

I don't use Chrome; I use Firefox. The address bar in Firefox typically goes to the first Google hit for the search terms in question, which is often what I want, but it isn't a general search.

Now you can bring on the You actually use Firefox? comment. ;-)

For one, my girlfriend does it all the time. I haven't observed other users recently, though.

I use it at work but not at home. At work, after searching the Internet for information I need to do my job, I routinely need to return to the departmental homepage of the company intranet. If a few clicks of the back button don't do it, I have to hit the home icon.

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