I've set my homepage to iGoogle. It doesn't take very long to load and I can add whatever I normally use right after starting my browser. So for me that's Google search, a gadget telling me if I've gotten any mail (Gmail), another gadget telling me if there was any activity in My Google Groups, etc. Right now I also have a countdown on there that tells me how many months and days I still have to wait to fly off to the US (currently at 2 months and 17 days). :-)