I recently started using my own home page in Firefox as a start-point
for all the important links that I should visit from time to time.
It’s been a good boost for productivity since it keeps the main
thing the main thing:

This was just a simple ‘idealet’ inspired by Opera’s Speed
Dial feature.

The advantages to using this are:

1. Quick access to things you need to access like your website
   management page or your bank website, instead of hunting around in
   the bookmarks menu.
2. Avoids the need for a bookmarks toolbar. I feel a toolbar takes too
   much screen real-estate compared to its usefulness.
3. When you’re bored, you open your homepage and visit some of the
   vast websites where you can learn stuff, like the ones under the
   ‘Grey Matter’ section.
4. It jogs your memory to visit some of the websites that you should
   visit from time to time, like any forums that you want to be
   updated on (instead of letting them flood your inbox).
5. Having a simple local HTML page as the homepage is much faster than
   an online start-page.
6. Backing up/restoring/editing a HTML file is simpler than
   a bookmarks database.

The only thing missing is that when I open a new tab, it should
automatically open with the home page instead of a blank page. This can
be done using the Tabbrowser Preferences add-on.

Update: Or you can simply use the many Speed Dial addons to Firefox out there…