Morning Coffee: why do we assume we only get one homepage?
Why do we assume we only get one homepage? For those willing to explore the potential of their browser, we'd like to show you a little out-of-the-box thinking in the form of Morning Coffee. — Though Firefox can set a series …
Context & Ripple Effects
Morning Coffee arrives at a moment when Firefox's edge over Internet Explorer is precisely its openness to this kind of experiment: research firms tracked Firefox climbing to 14% U.S. share through late 2006 and early 2007 while Microsoft lost ground despite 100M IE 7 installs, a gap built on users switching for what extensions let them change. A post like this one is the ecosystem working as designed — a small add-on questioning a default nobody had examined.
It also fits the Mozilla family's broader maturation traced in earlier coverage, from Firefox's open-source origins to cross-platform siblings like Camino 1.5 in mid-2007. Against that backdrop, 'why do we assume we only get one homepage?' is less a feature note than a probe of how much of the browsing experience defaults can be renegotiated.
First-order effects
- Firefox users who install Morning Coffee replace their single static homepage with a saved set of sites opened on demand, converting the start of a browsing session into a personal daily routine.
Second-order effects
- Every genuinely useful add-on like this deepens the differentiation that pulled users from Microsoft's browser in the first place — IE's closed model offers no answer, so each extension that changes behavior rather than just appearance widens the practical gap between the two platforms.
Third-order effects
- If defaults keep getting renegotiated this way, competition among browsers shifts from page rendering toward who controls the start-of-session experience — the slot where portals, search engines, and now independent extension developers all compete to be the first thing a user sees.
The trend: The browser homepage is dissolving from one fixed page into a programmable session, with third-party extensions on Firefox's add-on platform leading the renegotiation.