Make Hotmail your homepage in Safari (Windows or Apple Mac OS X)
If Safari is your default browser on Windows 7 / Vista / XP or Mac OS X, or if you use it primarily to check your Windows Live Hotmail account and emails, it makes sense to set Hotmail as your homepage: you can either make the inbox your homepage, or another folder; if you login from your own computer, you can safely choose to automatically sign in to Hotmail, which will allow Safari to go directly to your inbox, instead of asking you for your Windows Live credentials beforehand (email address and password).
Set Hotmail as homepage in Safari
Follow these steps to make your Hotmail inbox the home tab:
- Start by opening Safari, and type www.hotmail.com or www.live.com in the address bar; then, login to your Hotmail account, if possible by making the sign in form remember your email address and password - to spare you the manual login in the future.
- Then, go to your inbox, or the email folder you want to automatically load as homepage, and right-click on the URL (web address) to copy it to your clipboard:
- Then, open Safari's options dialog to configure your homepage: on Windows, click on the Edit menu; on Mac, click on the "Safari" menu; then, in both cases, choose "Preferences".
- Make sure that the "General" tab is selected; in the "Home Page" text field, paste the Hotmail address you just copied from the address bar (you can do the same thing by clicking on the "Set to Current Page" button if Windows Live Hotmail is the tab currently selected).
- Then, close the options dialog to return to Safari.
From now on, Hotmail is your Safari homepage: on Windows, you can hit the Ctrl+Shift+H keyboard shortcut to go to your homepage (your Hotmail inbox, presumably). On a Mac, press the equivalent keystroke of Command+Shift+H, and Safari will open your homepage.
Tip: if you want Safari to load your Hotmail account as homepage when you open a new tab or new window, just choose "Home Page" in the dropdown menus called "New windows open with" and "New tabs open with" in the options dialog.
New Hotmail, MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail & Live email are all referring to the same free webmail service offered by Microsoft and Windows Live Team (works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X). Microsoft Corporation, Apple, and other companies own the copyright or trademark to these and other terms mentioned.