Just to contribute to the general discussion, I use Bookmarks Home add-on for firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarkshome/ https://add

Just to contribute to the general discussion, I use Bookmarks Home add-on for firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarkshome/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarkshome...). It turns your bookmarks into a homepage. You can customize which bookmarks folders appear and tweak the css. You can also save the page to html and turn off or remove the add-on if you like. It does not include widget support though, so it doesn't address all of the issues mentioned in the original post.