Currently it's possible to make the footer/header different on the first page, but there are many cases it would be useful if you could manually set the page you want it to start on. For example if you'd like to have a table of contents in the beginning, but without the header/footer.
Since 67083 has more and detailed info about this issue setting this one here (despite being older) to dupe. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 67083 ***