New Tab Jumpstart isn't the name of some geeky new action movie, although that would be kind of cool. It's the latest in the ongoing development of a decent new tab behavior for Firefox. We've covered several attempts at getting this just right, and New Tab Jumpstart is one of the best so far. It seems largely inspired by the speed dial made popular by Opera and now Google Chrome, but that's not a bad thing.

Chrome users will find the layout of Jumpstart very familiar. The majority of the page is taken up by a grid of frequently-visited sites that you can pin permanently or delete. On the right, there's a search box, a list of recent bookmarks, and a list of recently-closed pages. It's a sensible starting point for a new browser session, although it lacks the eye candy of, for example, Safari's start page.

[via Lifehacker]

Start.io is an engine for creating customized start pages, with the added bonus of letting you know when your favorite sites have updated. It comes equipped with a drag-and-droppable interface for adjusting and grouping your links, and several nice-looking preloaded layouts to choose from. On top of that, the CSS is entirely customizable, so you can modify existing layouts, or build your own from scratch.

The first thing I wondered about Start.io was why it just lets you know that one of your links has updated, instead of using RSS to show you exactly what the updates were. The answer (explained on the about page) makes a lot of sense: you don't come to your start page when you want to read a bunch of RSS feeds. You go there when you want to click through to the sites themselves, not Google Reader or your standalone RSS app. If you want an RSS reader as your start page, there are other services you can check out, but I haven't see a complete start page engine like Start.io anywhere else.

What's your start page? Do you like Start.io, or do you have a better alternative? Let us know in the comments.

Yahoo has officially rolled out its updated personal start page to all My Yahoo! users. My Yahoo! 2.0 has been in beta for the last year or so. But now there's no more annoying little beta label, and users can't switch back to the classic page anymore. If you don't see the new page when you login, just wait a few days. According to PC Magazine Yahoo! plans to migrate all users by July 14th.

So what's new in My Yahoo! 2.0?

• Modules are easier to reorganize and modify thanks to a drag and drop interface
• There are new custom-designed modules with content from partners like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal
• New modules add support for third party services like Netflix, Gmail, Facebook and POP mail
• New page layout options

The new page is also available now for users in additional countries including Asustralia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the UK.

It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.

Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.

Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.

Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.

But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.

Pageonce is a personal start page that gives you access to the web services you use most frequently. While other start pages like iGoogle or Netvibes let you read updates from a variety of RSS feeds, Pageonce goes a few steps further, letting you add email accounts, social networking profiles, bank and credit card accounts, airlines, and shopping sites.

We first looked at Pageonce back in February when the service was in private beta. But today the company launched a public beta meaning anybody who's willing to part with a few usernames and passwords can sign up. We're still a bit wary of any site that asks for your bank login information. But we can also see how it would be useful to have all of your financial information at your fingertips without having to login to a half dozen different sites every day to check your account balances.

Pageonce has added a few features since February, including a news feed that gives you a run down of changes across all of your registered services.

[via TechCrunch]