Quite often we find ourselves in our busy working lives looking for tools, tricks and resources that will save us time and effort. However, we would have to invest more time in learning something first in order to get that time saving. Not exactly ideal!

Fast Start is a Chrome extension for your browser, it’s a neat little application that can save minutes off your daily web surfing routines and land you much more quickly into the familiar waters of your favorite websites. The convenience it provides while browsing the web is what makes this speed dial extension worth installing on your browser.

Inspired by Windows 8 and the metro interface, Fast Start uses tiles to display a series of website pages that you have most recently visited. The visual prompts including the websites title, icon, color coded interface and various size assortments makes it easy to find the website that you are looking for promptly.

Fast Start makes use of an intuitive assorting mechanism – drag and drop, anyone experienced with iOS, Windows or Android will be familiar with how to rearrange the tiles on Fast Start.

One of my favorite features of Fast Start is the bookmarks, quite often with the native Chrome experience I found that my bookmarks were difficult to navigate through – I had several folders deep websites and often too many sites within each folder for the native Chrome design. Thanks to use of breadcrumbs and the tile based experience, I now find using my bookmarks much easier.

Fast Start has a very colorful UI by default, some might like it and some others might not. It gives customization options for all the screen elements, so you can make it the way you like it. Whilst I favor the use of Fast Start on my browser, I must add that it feels rather playful and fun – and whilst it is customizable to be a little more corporate, some might find the colors a little bit overwhelming as the first thing in the morning. So, whether you use it on your home PC or the workplace one, Fast Start can adapt to the situation with the customization options. Fast start is a good tool that can make your tech life easier.

In addition, whilst the extension intelligently selects your favorite websites as per the default, it automatically also adds in Google, Facebook, Amazon and YouTube. These links cannot be removed, unlike your own tiles.  Broadly speaking however, everything else is customizable, from the colors to the icons, to the text – even the size and positions.

Fast Start is one of the best Chrome Extensions that customize your opening tabs, whilst we liked the ability to customize everything and how quickly it loads in the browser, we didn’t like that Facebook, YouTube and Google tiles could not be removed from the tile interface. But since these sites are most peoples’ favorite, it should be fine with everyone. You can get Fast Start by going to this chrome web store link- Fast Start Chrome Extension. From what we have seen of it, Fast Start is very handy and one of the few must have extensions for Google chrome.