I would guess that the large majority of internet users have Google as their browser homepage. Most of us use Chrome, and their search engine is the default homepage, and frankly there doesn't seem to be much need to change it.
I broke that habit when I installed the daily.dev extension.
For anyone who hasn't heard of it, it's a browser extension that collates news articles from a huge range of tech blogs and websites across the net, and then displays them whenever you create a new window/tab. I kept seeing tweets praising it, so I had to give it a go.
I've had it installed for a few months now, and the amount of new information I've read since then is remarkable.
Some of the blogs in the sources list are ones that I was already aware of, and occasionally read whenever I was Googling a problem and came across their site. To be able to read new articles by them as they come out, without having to collect all the RSS feeds manually is pretty great.
I've had to filter out a lot of the sources mind. For instance, I haven't touched Java since university, and I haven't got much motivation to do so again, so the dozen or so Java-specific news sources were the first to go.
Only downside? As a .NET developer, I will often load large websites locally where the IIS application pool hasn't started, which means the site will take a minute or two to load the first page. Quite often I'll open a tab, go to that site, see the little spinner and wait while browsing articles on the daily.dev page, only to forget that I'm loading a site and go off and read an unrelated article.
I can't really blame it for that though. In fact, I can't fault it at all!
Grab the extension here: Daily.dev browser extension
