I use MSN.com for my home page on a couple of computers and keep it bookmark’d at work, where my home page is an internal news site. I’ve done this for years, since there’s usually a nice smattering of news on the MSN home page.

Looks like they’ve made a change that will force me to change my home page on the majority of my PC’s.

You could say it’s been a long time in coming, but I never thought it would actually happen.

The first change that irked me was the defaulting to the “broadband” version. I like the “narrowband” version. They both have the same information, and nearly the same headlines, with two notable differences. First is that the broadband offers a slide show for headlines, which irks me: I want headlines to be there immediately. I don’t want to have to wait for them to scroll or click through them. Second is the headlines themselves: on the broadband page, they point to video clips but on the narrowband page, they point to web pages. While I’m all for video over the ‘net, I don’t want to have to wait for an ad and then watch the clip play… I wanna skim over an article. Remember that this is my start page for the most part – odds are I’m being distracted on my way to another destination entirely… I was willing to overlook this when it happened a year ago.

To combat against this, if I selected narrowband, it would save that change as a cookie. Yay! Of course, every 30 days or so, the page would default back to broadband, as the cookie expired – I could live with that too, as it was a minor issue.

A few months ago, they made another change to the page. Default focus was put on the search box as the page opened. Great for people that are using the page as a search springboard but rather crappy for people that were using this as a start page and expected focus to be on the Address Bar. Yes, I have the same complaint of Google’s home page, so it’s not product bias at work. But, OK, I could live with that for now.

And then yesterday I got the deal breaker: no more narrowband option. At least I can’t find it. It’s definitely showing me the Video-intensive broadband page now… the link that would make the switch back is definitely not where it used to be, and I can’t find it on the main page. As near as I can tell, it’s gone, which means that I now have to retire MSN.com as my default page.

Thankfully, Start.com has risen as a great replacement: it’s now my default home page.