Protopage has been around since 2005, and it still works. It's free, it lets you add as many widgets and bookmarks as you need, and it splits your page into tabs. If you're looking for something else anyway, two things are worth knowing first: what you'd be giving up, and that there's no export button on the way out.

This guide covers both. Where to go depends on what you used Protopage for, and moving your links takes a small trick, not a download.

What Protopage is good at

Protopage describes itself first as an RSS reader, and that's a fair summary. It's a dashboard in the iGoogle tradition: feeds, widgets and bookmark lists, arranged in tabs.

So the useful question is which half of it you actually used.

If you mostly read feeds and widgets

Then you want another dashboard, not a page of links. Start.me is one: a page of feeds and widgets that you can spread across several pages. If the feeds were the whole point, a dedicated feed reader is the other route.

We don't make widgets or read feeds, so if this is you, one of those is the better fit.

If you mostly used the bookmarks

If your page is mostly lists of links with some widgets around them, the sites you open every day grouped by topic, that part can come with you. It doesn't need a dashboard on the other end.

Protopage has no export, but it has the one thing you need: a bookmark widget can open all of its links at once.

  1. Hover over the header of a bookmark widget and click "open all". Protopage opens every link in that widget as a tab in a new window. If nothing happens, allow pop-ups for Protopage.
  2. In that window, right-click any tab and choose to bookmark all tabs (the exact menu name varies by browser). Your browser saves them as one new folder. Name it after the widget.
  3. Close the window and repeat for the next widget you actually use. Skip the ones you don't.
  4. Export your bookmarks to a file from your browser's bookmark manager, then import that file wherever you're going next.

Feeds won't come along this way, because they aren't links. And there's no need to bring the lists you stopped opening.

Where Abunch fits

We make one of these, so read this part with that in mind.

An Abunch board with sites grouped into named categories on the Active side.

Abunch is a personal homepage: your sites grouped into categories you name, on the page your browser opens to. Your Daily sites sit up front, and on Standard the Occasional ones live on a second desktop a click away, so nothing has to be deleted to keep the front page calm. Daily and Occasional appear in the app as Active and Reserved.

It takes the bookmark file from step 4 directly. Anything outside a folder lands in a category called Unsorted, so nothing gets lost. If the file holds more than your plan allows, the import pauses and asks you to leave some folders out.

There are no widgets, no feeds and no ads. Your categories and links export as a file (JSON) on every plan, including the free one. The free plan is a real homepage. Standard adds the second desktop, much more room, and publishing your categories to Explore. Current limits and prices are on the pricing page.

If you'd rather not start from an empty page, you can copy a ready-made collection to start from.

Make it the page your browser opens to

Whichever you pick, use it as your homepage: in your browser's settings, choose to open a specific page on startup and paste in its address. It takes a minute, and it's what makes any of these feel like home.

Best for

Another dashboard (Start.me): you read feeds and use widgets every day.

A feed reader: the feeds were the whole point.

Abunch: your Protopage was mostly links, and you want them on a calm page that exports on every plan.