Custom New Tab Page

I built a Chrome extension which lets me customise my own new tab page by writing custom HTML+CSS+JS.

Most people I know who use computers often have installed a Chrome extension that changes the default page that opens when they create a new tab. Finding the perfect Chrome extension with all the features you want is impossible though, so I figured I would just make my own since I know how to code.

Some features I have added to my own new tab page include:

• Quick links to all my email accounts.
• Hotkeys that open a few common websites I visit.
• Live cryptocurrency prices fetched from an API.
  • This was mostly just to prove external HTTP requests work, although the result has been a continuous awareness of the price of Bitcoin these past few years.
• A counter which increments each time I open the new tab page.
  • This number often reaches upwards of 50k before I eventually reset my computer.
  • One day I might store this data in a persistent location and see how high it gets.
• Live updating datetime string with seconds.
  • With both Sydney and UTC timezones, because I often found myself converting manually.

The experience has been really good as I've been using the custom new tab page dozens of times per day since late 2019 and haven't looked back. A few times now I've had people ask me where I got my fancy new tab page from and I get to give them the DIY pitch. 😀

So yeah, I would totally recommend making your own new tab page to anyone who knows even basic web dev. To give others the same benefit, I tried to make it as easy as possible with this GitHub repo to remove the friction of also needing to create a Chrome extension.