This is what iGoogle used to be! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle You could add your own RSS feed, weather, etc and it used to be awesome. Used to be my "home" tab for many years, before google decided to do away with it.

It appears there's a "replacement" now. https://igoogleportal.com/

Definitely going to try this one out

> It appears there's a "replacement" now. https://igoogleportal.com/ Very non-obvious that this is not affiliated with Google, I'd think twice about giving it your credentials. Honestly surprised it hasn't been C&D'd based on the URL alone.

Seriously? I'd say from the domain alone it's clearly nothing to do with Google. (I mean, not to my mother, but here.) Clicking through it looks nothing like a Google page or logo etc. - and I don't even use them (except YouTube and rather de-Googled Android) so I'm not that familiar.

Other than the logo you could absolutely be fooled into thinking that homepage is an official Google property, especially if you're a non-technical user.

I mean it redirects to https://igtab.com

So their normal domain doesn't have anything to do with Google, and they're not trying to fool anyone.

Definitely doesn't redirect for me.

That was my homepage for many years too. The most prominent feature was a running sticky note. Don't really miss it anymore though; I've gotten used to using pinned tabs and bookmarks for anything I need access to regularly. (And a more fleshed-out note taking system.)

I never recovered news-wise from losing iGoogle, I'll check this out thanks.

I also run a customizable start page http://myfav.es

its cost $100/month for 10 years to run but i keep it up because a lot of schools use it to help set up their shared computers and i couldn’t ever have the heart to shut it down.

Once you set it up you can also run it entirely offline using app manifests from myfav.es/fast if you don’t like the idea of your new tab experience being slowed down by web requests.

Why so expensive?

Certainly not because of maintenance costs since he's still running PHP 5.5

I detest this meme where supposedly every hour you have is translatable to money.

It isn't as if you can sell every hour of your time whenever you feel like it. If it were that way, you'd be able to say: "I pay $1500+ for going to the toilet each month":

> A software engineer who makes $100,000 a year, working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, makes about $50/hour.

So let's say 1 hour of toilet time per day on average, so: 30 * 50 = 1500.

What nonsense.

> I detest this meme where supposedly every hour you have is translatable to money.

> It isn't as if you can sell every hour of your time whenever you feel like it.

Yes, but a public good has costs whether or not you want to acknowledge them.

On top of that who on earth would price their free time at same as they do their job? My free time is 2-4x the job

> "I pay $1500+ for going to the toilet each month"

It's a little less (I don't need that long), but most importantly, my boss is paying for most of that.

Don't shit where you eat? Instead, shit where you work?

Makes sense ;)

I think the saying is "Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time."

I very much doubt they where talking about this, and where instead referring to their hosting costs.

Do browsers even support app manifests anymore? I thought they'd abandoned them in favor of service workers.

Is this not the exact same feature-set the browser's built-in 'start pages' already provide?

how much do you make out of it?

All: please consider telling your competitors about Animated Tabs [0] as to slow down their productivity per new tab.

[0] http://animatedtabs.com/

Impressively fast! I love the bonsai. Way too much distractions for me though. Shameless plug: I made a new tab page that's just markdown notes and bookmarks - https://nutab.co

I love this. This is exactly what I was looking for.

But please, make it open source or announce your monetization plans. Freeware extensions tend to be acquired by the worst companies or bundle malware eventually. If you say you have no plans and intend to keep your word, I shall make an open-source version myself.

But don't let this rant detract from the main point: I love this a lot. If it were somehow synced with Firefox sync, I'd gladly throw even more money (donation, one time purchase) your way.

Thank you! First and foremost, I made nuTab for myself. I wanted a minimal, private notepad as my new tab page. I really don't want to sell it or make it invasive in any way.

Also, no monetization plans yet, but if they come, I'll make sure they're not breaking the original promise of privacy and simplicity.

Firefox sync would be nice, although I would make it optional.

That looks very nice! How is the data saved?

Could I set something up where I can edit it both in the browser and my editor or something?

Thanks! Everything is saved in the extension's local storage. Nothing leaves the browser. You can export editor content from the settings (three dots in the bottom left corner). That creates a .md file with your notes that you can probably import to any editor.

Cool. Is there a way to reliably retrieve the path of the internal markdown file (I assume it is a markdown file within the extension as well) so that I can setup a cron job to export it or something?

Also a firefox add-on would be cool as well.

There's no internal markdown file. When you press the export button, it gets generated from the HTML content of the editor. The extension saves the state of the editor in browser's local storage. I don't think it's possible to access it outside of the extension itself.

There is a Firefox add-on, if you visit the site from Firefox, it should point you to the Mozilla Add-ons page [0].

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nutab-new-tab...

Ok clear. Thanks.

Also thank you for the link to the firefox add-on.

If you were so inclined, you could look into setting up some storage integrations with things like owncloud or dropbox. I believe they offer APIs that allow you to store files without having to write a server-side integration with them.

same on distractions. if I have good intentions opening a new tab (e.g. I'm going to open GCP logging to debug something), I don't want a random story from HN pulling me in.

I have been using https://tabliss.io/ for a while now. Yours seem cool, but I personally don't like too much information on my start page.

Only reason I use tabliss is to see random Unsplash image on every new tab.

tabliss is great, you can pull up your github contribution calendar (without needing to sign in to github), show the weather, and add links that you can open with the number keys which is convenient and saves a solid quarter second of typing every time I open a new tab, which is fun.

Looks good! The design is, hm, very opinionated, but well done.

Shameless plug - last year, I solve my New Tab page too :-) And it shares a lot of ideas with yours - https://new-tab.vlad.studio/

One small thing: You let me preview the cool bookshelf wallpaper, but then I can't click on it to immediately get that one. I scrolled through the first two pages of wallpapers, not able to find it. Would be a cool addition to just be able to click the wallpaper that is currently on preview at the top.

That's a very valid report, thanks! I'll look into adding a search option to the wallpaper picker. This particular picture is called Library and is quite old :-)

This is wonderful -- only thing missing is a bookmarks tile!

Edit: Just saw the readme, maybe I should attempt to add my own!

Oh mate there's tens of tiles I can think of that I still want to add in, just off the top of my head:

- Emails - Quotes of the day - Bookmarks - RSS Feeds - Countdown clocks - GitHub stats

That's what I can rattle off in about 10 seconds of thinking, there's so many things that could be done. At some point you have to just call it a day.

RSS would be awesome

about:blank gang here

personally i'd love to get a widget layer like the old mac dashboard or the windows 8 start menu. miss those a lot, but never really wanted to put those widgets in my browser...

I'm in the about:blank gang too, and I hate that in Safari on iOS you can no longer have a blank tab since a few versions. You can hide all the things on the "start page" but then you will still see the edit button.

Firefox displays a search bar, but yes, an empty new tab is good. The awesome bar is what I use to access the thing I intent to access when I press CTRL+T, whether it's an history search, or a web search, or an URL. The fewer things displayed on my screen trying to distract me, the better :-)

I like me some widgets, but pretty much the only time I see the bare desktop is when the machine restarts. So instead I put some in the menu bar (Mac's ‘tray’), in the dock and in the bottom corners around the dock. I'm using open-source ‘Stats’ for the menu; there's also BitBar iirc. The stock Activity Manager for the dock, and custom scripts in Hammerspoon for drawing anywhere on the screen, namely in the corners.

> “Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994.

> So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer.

> As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provided by CERN is a good entry point into the web; it points you to a lot of resources fairly quickly. However, there are lots of reasons to want your own home page.”

> He meant that maybe the links provided by CERN are far from your interests and you’d prefer, for example, links to medicine rather than physics resources when you open your browser. So you could edit the CERN page, filling it with your links and notes and it would be your home page.

> So 50 years later :), in 1993, with the arrival of the Mosaic browser, the web left academia. Web users got ideas and tools to extend home pages, and turn them into websites. The term “home page” started to change its meaning. It became the first page of a website. Then as a sort of metonymy, it started to mean personal web pages. Making a home page soon meant not making the first document of your website, but making your personal website, your home page, YOUR HOME ON THE WEB.

Olia Lialina, net artist who does a lot of internet history stuff: https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5118

Wrote about homepages recently. https://maya.land/monologues/2022/09/19/homepages.html I hope people have fun with this tool! Even without getting your hands dirty yourself with some HTML, it encourages an attitude of "I ought to be able to make this be how I want" towards technology

When looking up weather, I get

> Sorry, that city doesn't exist

Seems you mean to say that you couldn't find that city.

Also, why do the tile contents change when I change the theme? The google search bar changes to a time ruler depending on the theme.

Good work though!

The idea behind the tiles changing when you switch themes is so that you can have more distinction that just colours between themes.

For instance you might want a "focused" theme with just blank tiles and the day planner.

Or a "stocks" theme with just stock tickers and related subreddits.

Why does it assume I'm using Chrome? (I'm not.)

I'd at least suggest you let people know "this one" links to a Chrome-specific extension.

Can you remove stock tabs?

Reminds me of http://start.me, which is highly customizable and also offers a new tab extension.

Nice work! One request pls - can you tie two different themes to light and dark mode, my computer goes into dark mode at sunset and it would be great if I could pick one theme for dark mode and one theme for light mode. I love the pink theme bug I don't want it once the sun goes down, I'd go for dark theme then, but of course I don't want the dark theme during the day.

Nice! Seems interesting, might give it a try. Would you mind sharing the pixel art gif that it's seen in the gif/video showcase?

This seems a good candidate for a personal dashboard akin what suggested by https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1442865840882212873

This looks very nice, thanks for sharing it. I really like the way the settings pane works, being able to see the change right away instead of the browser.

Since many people have shared theirs, I have also built a new-tab extension for a few years ago, it displays Hacker News, Product Hunt, GitHub Trending and a few more platforms on the grid, I have ~2k people using it: https://github.com/karakanb/devo

I will experiment with this settings design to incorporate sth similar in Devo, thanks for the inspiration!

This is awesome! My friend Nick and I ran a site like this a long time ago called qduke.com that we eventually sold to the student newspaper after we graduated. We entered the Duke Startup Challenge with that idea — the best start pages on the Internet. But our tech wasn't as good as yours is. Didn't have that much programming experience at the time.

I love how its open source and you use local storage. If there's anything I can do to help feel free to reach out!

This is very nice. It does, however, assume you only use one browser, or one device. I use a static page (https://github.com/rcarmo/sui) that I’ve since hacked to have zero off-LAN dependencies other than the weather, and which I set as home in everything.

But I like the idea of having a few widgets, so this is good inspiration - I just need to add an express server to store a bit of JSON.

Also check out dashy[0] which does much of the same (including the option for server side configuration). Personally I'm happy with the tabliss[1] addon for firefox

[0] https://dashy.to/

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/

Fun fact, I wrote the initial prototype of a chrome extension called the Awesome New Tab Page while a junior in high school, it's fun to see it's still around!

Anyone remember using "MyYahoo!" where you could customize the page, putting feeds and other things in the boxes and arranging them as you saw fit?

I used that from 1996 until the 2010s when some of my favorite RSS feeds refused to load there. I had it in "compact mode" and it was super dense (no images, not much white space) so I could fit 5-10 stories from each feed, plus stock prices.

If anyone here used my yahoo extensively, what is the best replacement now?

Yes! That was my homepage for years. Such a great density of customizable information.

Hi friend, do you mind adding a licence to the github repo

The design is super opinionated but I LOVE IT! Especially the colored dark - I really do hate how dark modes really muddy out a lot of colors (I often find myself using the Windows High Contrast mode, especially in VSCode). Love the amount of customizability to make it exactly what I want. Will start using this!

Nice work, good job! I like the pastel colors and the design.

We run https://websktop.com which also can be used as a new tab page (it's even faster with our Chrome extension) but it's not as "dynamic" - just your bookmarks.

Well done, just made it my homepage too :)

Awesome, glad to hear it! Let me know if you have any questions :)

I use the default firefox new tab with the frequently used website icons zoomed in a little but this is cool.

Personally I'm longing for a slight variation on the default page, where I could freely arrange the shortcuts how I see fit—instead of having them in a 6×2 table (or 8×2, can't remember at the phone). It's like Windows vs Mac again: MS loves coercing everything into tables, because that's easy for programmers—while Apple understands that people want to navigate with some visual guides and reference points.

This is awesome! I really missed portals and start pages that we get to customize from back in the days.

I love how fast everything works! And the fact that you implemented themes are also a big respect.

I had this idea a few years ago when I was a much worse programmer and gave it a try with https://widget-board.com

I use https://github.com/bastienwirtz/homer for quite some time.

No useless bells an whistles (sorry author), no external API references, blazingly fast, nicely done

I've been working on the same idea as a side project. this is a hell of a bar. great job

Nice work - i got a positive experience being able to type in location, stock, reddits and getting something back quickly. This could make a good homescreen for a device mounted on a wall in your home perhaps from a repurposed e-reader.

nice!

Some suggestions for me at least

1. Why I can't I set any tile to any type?

2. An RSS feed tile would be nice. It seems I can only follow HN, Reddit, Twitter

3. Would be great if I could drag and drop tiles to arrange like (https://nomcopter.github.io/react-mosaic/) or (https://xcfox.github.io/react-tile-pane/demo/) etc...

4. A random image tile would be nice

5. Use the extension sync to sync across machines? (maybe that's already in the extension version)

> 2. An RSS feed tile would be nice.

Merging content of all my feeds. And where I say all my feeds I mean all feeds that the automation happens to find on all the pages I visit, until I set them to removed/hidden explicitly.

This reminds me of the behemoth that is superstart[0]. Everything from banking to recipes in it's ugly glory

[0]https://www.superstart.se/

This is almost exactly what I needed, thank you :)

One thing I couldn't figure out, what format the stock ticker prefers, you could add a search feature there, or a (?) icon that explains the format.

This is great. Out of curiosity, why not just wrap this as a standalone addon? Not questioning your decision btw, just thinking that the current approach may increase your hosting cost, no?

Really like the idea and very well done. I think it would be really nice if we could change the widget as well. For example, I don't use Spotify at all so it be replace with other widget.

You can! Change the "Tile Type" option in the sidebar

This is a truly excellent site I like how easy the ui is everything makes sense and I like the little tutorial it gives you much better than the ui for onboarding on most saas.

The stock component is missing an error message, when it can't find a stock. I entered "MSCI World" and it just kept loading and loading.

Fixed!

Currently my new tab page is Weboasis[0], it's pretty nifty. Has a lot of neat tools and a fully customizable RSS feed.

RIP Webby

May his soul be one with Brahman

[0]: weboasis.app

Would be good to have this as an offline open source extensions for firefox (which also sets the new start tab to itself)

The wide tiles don't have a bonsai mode, and the narrow tiles are too narrow to show the whole bonsai. :-(

I use the artstation extension for a new image with every new tab. That's a bit of beauty throughout the day.

Looks pretty nice :-). But why does changing the theme reset the weather location?

This would be awesome if only Chrome allowed one to point a new tab page somewhere…

The tutorial links to an addon that enables this.

I developed this for my own needs: Goal Board https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-...

Can't you still do that with a Chrome Extension?

I use this extension[0]

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/custom-new-tab-url...

What tool did you use for the "tour"/tutorial at the start?

This is what I have been dreaming for years. Amazing job!

iGoogle nostalgia :)

Good ole days.

This is impressive, love the background with a gif!

Awesome work sir! I would definitely use it.

Looks broken on Firefox, everything is blurry!

There is a tutorial modal that pops up and blurs the background. If you don’t get that for some reason, it would just be blurry. Works fine on FF for me.

Couldn't leave the tutorial, nothing was responding but a refresh did fix it!

Bravo! Very nice!

That 盆栽(bonsai) grabbed my heart

not sure if I missed it but how do you get the animated background?

If you include a url to a gif in the background segment it will work:

url(https://i.imgur.com/BkgF7ET.gif)

^ Bit of a loud example that one

I also recommend making all the tiles transparent when you have a nice background:

rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2)

Thanks for sharing that gif! The author has some amazing ones posted on their Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnasAbdin

ah ok tyvm

What does the ruler do?

It's a daily planner, if I'm not mistaken.

It rules.

you got me

The last thing I need is such a stream of information in my new tab page. I would never get anything done. Thank the Lord for about:blank

Anecdote about about:blank: When I worked in a pc repair shop, when I set up new computers I always configured the browser (back in the day this was IE 6 and older) to start with about:blank because it just starts faster without having to load the MSN website or whatever. At some point my boss told me to stop doing that because customers thought the internet wasn't working.

Well, as a repair worker you're also not really supposed to mess with settings that are frankly purely subjective (yes, about:blank loads faster, but if people want to always go to MSN first, you've just increased the time and friction to get there), and have nothing to do with whatever problem people came to see you about.

I only did it on new pc's that had never been in customer's hands, not existing accounts. If computers came in for repair I didn't touch the settings.

Yeah that’s reasonable. I’m confused at the kind of customers you guys had though. Even my parents (tech illiterate baby boomers) know enough basic PC knowledge to try to type “www.google.com” into the address bar to determine if they have internet.

Can't speak for those customers, but I know people today, younger than 35 who think whatever is set to the homepage IS the internet.

Some had Google as their homepage. Some Facebook.

I learned this when they would be like "Josh, the internet is down, can you help me?" and I'm like wahhhhh? Come to find out Facebook had an outage. "I just opened the internet and its not working". :facepalm:

People can't use computers: http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...

I get calls for this at least once a week. "Computer is slow/down" or "internet not working" when really the corporate partner's homepage is having issues. (Usually when everybody is sending in their orders for the week.)

When I worked at Yahoo! (2003-2005), Yahoo! Search would bring up a second search box under the primary search box in the results if people searched for Google, as a not insignificant number of people would start their browser, have Yahoo as their homepage, yet enter "Google" in the search box when they wanted to search for something.

Supposedly the second search box in the results fooled a substantial proportion of those people into entering their search term rather than clicking through to Google.

That is the level of tech illiterate users many people had to deal with back when IE 6 was a current browser.

What a disappointment that the top comment is a dig on someone else's work.

Perhaps next time you could try, "looks amazing, not for me".

I generally agree - a new tab should, for the most part, be distraction-free.

However, with some cleverness, you can add content to the new tab page that adds value - e.g. AnkiTab (https://github.com/corollari/ankiTab) to help you review your decks. Sure, it's a minor distraction, but it's time-bounded (unlike a news feed), and theoretically it's a net gain if your decks contain knowledge that's genuinely useful to you.

About blank is too white for me, so I simply removed everything from a speeddial except background. Bookmarks bar folders are my friends. Docs, prod.sites, dev.links, localhost:8000, services, music - all is right there. It also saves one click compared to speeddial.

Would be nice if it could be configured to live on a sidebar, and a checkbox for each bookmark to always open in a new tab. But you can’t get everything you want, I guess.

A lot of people are going to arrive on mobile, get turned away, and never come back again. Consider putting together something to give an impression of what you’ve done, or a “Show me anyway, even though it’s not optimized for mobile” button, or even just some screenshots.

A very good call, to be honest I had completely forgotten about that part of the code it's been so long I implemented that.

Thanks for the reminder, I'll fix it now

I was sidelined sorry, it's all fixed now.

There's a demo video along with a button that will take you through to the less than ideal layout.

Crushed it!

Lovely work, but Jesus Christ, if I put Reddit and HN on my home tab I would never get anything done.

Humble New Tab Page is how I solved mine. I don't need any distractions. Just the title and icon of the bookmarks I need.

Hmm. It just shows me a blank page, like about:blank, only it uses 112% CPU. That doesn't seem very useful.

Oh, I see: looking in the console is an infinity of error messages, mostly "Error handling response: Error: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document." Yeah: yet another page that can't load correctly with cookies disabled—only this one also manages to drain my battery.

Look: I am sure your page is very pretty, but if you can't even manage to write code that fails gracefully in this very simple and common scenario, I don't think I trust you to not have made mistakes with more serious consequences.

- not that common a scenario

- this uses localStorage which is similar to cookies but not the same thing

- for a site that extolls 'all the data is saved in your browser', how should it cope with a browser with storage disabled?

- How do you log in to HN with cookies disabled?

Disabling cookies quite naturally disabled local storage as well, since localStorage can be used to identify and track a user as surely as a cookie can, at least if they have JavaScript enabled.

I selectively enable cookies on websites that I wish to remember me as required. The vast majority of websites are perfectly capable of loading and operating without cookies / localStorage (though more recently a lot of them will keep popping up annoying cookie banners on every page load, since they can't remember I asked them not to use cookies if I don't let them set a cookie to remember that fact, ironically enough).

There are numerous sites that are not _useful_ without cookies, but even the majority of those detect that cookies are disabled and explain that they are required, and most of the rest do something broken but basically understandable like generating a XSRF-detected error or redirecting one back to the login page over and over again.

Even the small minority that fail to do anything at all and just sit there showing a blank page are at least harmless.

Doing nothing useful _and_ using >100% CPU would therefore seem to entail either an unusually high level of incompetence, a wanton disregard for good practice (i.e. graceful degradation) or outright malice.

I'll choose to apply Hanlon's razor and assume it's the former until proven otherwise.

...how else the website that is start page is supposed to remember what you have set it up ?

You sound like someone that rode on bald tires for a year, finally crashed into a wall, then started to sue manufacturer because "car didn't told me to change them"

That is an unreasonable comparison.

Man enabled feature that will break anything with persistence

Man used site that uses persistence.

Man compares the thing is broken

How it is not unreasonable ?