Chrome extension

Your most-opened page, finally yours.

You open a new tab dozens of times a day and never chose what's on it. Open Slate replaces it with a speed dial and dashboard: tiles, widgets and a wallpaper engine, with close to everything about the look under your control.

Add to Chrome See what it does

Free and MIT licensed. No account, no sign-in, no telemetry.

New Tab
Search or type a URL
The Open Slate new tab page over a dusk photograph: a search box above a calendar showing today's events, a clock, a task list, a list of open tabs, a pomodoro timer and the local weather, each on a translucent panel tinted by the wallpaper behind it.
15 widgets 23 search engines 233 brand logos 10 clock faces 8 palettes 5 wallpaper kinds 0 trackers
What it does

A dashboard that earns the space.

Most new tab replacements give you a photo and a clock. Open Slate gives you the page you'd have built yourself, if you had the time.

Tiles that look like the sites they open

Logos come from a bundled Simple Icons dataset with the brand's own colour. Every other site gets its favicon rendered large on a plate tinted by sampling that favicon, so the grid stays coherent even for sites nobody has a logo for.

  • Drag to reorder, drop onto a folder to file it away
  • Split tiles across named pages
  • Alt+1–9 opens by position
  • Paste an image URL or upload your own
New Tab
Search or type a URL
A grid of ten site tiles, each showing the site's brand logo on a plate tinted with the brand colour, with the site name beneath.
Eight tiles with each plate painted in the site's own brand colour and the logo knocked out in white or black. Brand: the plate takes the site's colour
The same eight tiles on neutral dark plates, each logo drawn in its own brand colour. Neutral: the theme surface, coloured logo
The same eight tiles on plates washed with a dim version of each brand colour. Tinted: a wash of the brand colour
The same eight logos with almost no plate behind them, sitting directly on the page. Transparent: no plate at all
The same eight sites, four plate styles apart. One setting, and it applies to every tile at once, including the ones drawn from a favicon rather than a bundled logo.
New Tab
Search or type a URL
A tile grid over a dusk wallpaper with two folders named Design and Reading beside four ordinary tiles, and a page switcher underneath offering Main and Watch.
Folders hold what you rarely need, and named pages split the rest; here a second page called Watch. A grid of ten scales to a grid of fifty without becoming a wall.

Fifteen widgets, and none of them overlap

A grid of square cells with five standard sizes that widgets snap to, the way phone widgets do. Growing or dropping one moves whatever was in the way, at every window size, not just the one you're looking at.

  • Clock with ten faces, weather, calendar, notes, greeting
  • Tasks with priorities, due dates and filters — typed, not clicked
  • Pomodoro, countdown and stopwatch in one timer
  • RSS feeds, crypto prices
  • Recently closed, most visited, open tabs, bookmarks, history, downloads
New Tab
Search or type a URL
The dashboard view: a calendar showing today's hours and three events, a digital clock, a task list with priority and due-date labels, a list of open tabs, a pomodoro timer and a weather widget, laid out on a grid.
New Tab
Search or type a URL
A dense dashboard showing twelve widgets at once: a greeting, a flip clock, the weather, a notepad, a task list, an RSS feed, live crypto prices, a list of open tabs, a month calendar, browser history, bookmarks and a pomodoro timer.
Nearly all of them at once, on one page. Downloads, Recently closed and Most visited are missing here for an honest reason: they read your own browser, and this shot was taken in an empty profile that has nothing to show them.
New Tab
Search or type a URL
Ten clock faces side by side over a wallpaper: digital, minimal, monospace, flip, a words face reading '25 to twelve', a binary dot grid, three analog faces in classic, minimal and bauhaus styles, and a rings face.
Ten clock faces, including one that spells the time out and one that counts in binary. The clock is only the widget with the most faces; every other one has its own settings too.

Everything, one keystroke away

Cmd/Ctrl+K searches your tabs, tiles, bookmarks, history and every settings command at once, with a web search as the fallback. The search box itself takes bang shortcuts (!yt cats), detects addresses, and does arithmetic inline.

  • 23 search engines
  • Suggestions drawn from your own data, never a remote service
  • Type a host and it navigates instead of searching
New Tab
Search or type a URL
The command palette open over the tile grid, showing results for the query 'op': open settings, the extensions page, downloads, history, the bookmark manager, and a web search fallback.
Make it yours

One extension, however you want it.

Eight palettes, automatic light and dark, a corner radius that runs from fully round to fully square, four surface styles, and an accent that can be sampled from your wallpaper. Every preference is searchable, and updates live across every open tab.

New Tab
Search or type a URL
The same tile grid in a light theme with square corners, white plates and labels below each tile.

The same grid, two settings apart

This is the page above with a different palette, a corner radius of two pixels, solid surfaces instead of glass and labels moved below the plate. Nothing was rebuilt; those are four switches in settings.

  • Solid, gradient, image, video or slideshow wallpaper
  • Dim, blur, brightness, saturation, zoom, vignette, slow drift
  • Export your whole config, or share a theme code that carries the look and none of your content
  • Opt-in sync across devices

Settings that don't hide anything

Every preference is declared once and the interface renders itself from that declaration, so there's no settings screen that quietly lags behind what the extension can actually do.

  • Search every setting by name
  • Changes apply live, in every open tab
  • Ten clock faces, four surface styles, three densities
  • Import and export the whole configuration as a file
Open Slate Settings
Settings
The settings page, showing theme controls: light and dark mode, eight palette swatches, accent colour source, corner radius, surface style, opacity, blur and shadow.
New Tab
Search or type a URL
The same dashboard in a warm light theme with outlined panels: a calendar, a clock reading 23:40, a task list, open tabs, a pomodoro timer and the weather.
The same dashboard as further up, in the light Paper palette with outlined panels instead of glass. The dark shots on this page are a choice, not the only mode.
Open Slate Settings
Settings
The Wallpaper settings section: a type switch offering gradient, solid, image, video and slideshow; a media library holding one image marked 'In use'; a field for an image address; and framing controls for fit, zoom and slow drift.
A wallpaper can be a colour, a gradient, an image, a video or a slideshow. Whatever you add stays in this browser: the library is IndexedDB on your own machine, and nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Open Slate Settings
Settings
The settings page with 'colour' typed into its search box, returning results grouped under three headings at once: the eight palette swatches and the accent control under Appearance, a theme-matching toggle under Wallpaper, and the plate colour switch under Tiles.
Search every preference by name and the results arrive from wherever they live; here colour reaches into Appearance, Wallpaper and Tiles at once, rather than making you guess which screen it was on.
Privacy

It asks for nothing.

A new tab page sees every tab you open. That is exactly why this one collects nothing, and why most of what it can do stays switched off until you ask for it.

No analytics

No telemetry, no crash reporting, no identifiers. Nothing is collected, transmitted or sold.

No content scripts

The extension runs on its own page and nowhere else. It cannot read the sites you visit, because it never runs on them.

Permissions on use

It installs with five, none of which can read another site. Tabs, history, bookmarks, downloads and sessions are requested the moment you add the widget that needs one, and declining leaves the rest working.

Your data stays put

Settings and tiles live in local storage; wallpapers in IndexedDB. Nothing is uploaded, and sync is off unless you turn it on, per device.

No location prompt

Geolocation is never declared and never called. The weather widget places itself from a city-level lookup, or you type a town.

Four outbound calls, all optional

Weather, a one-off city lookup, coin prices and the feeds you added. Each behind a widget you chose and a permission you granted. None carries an identifier.

Open source

Don't take the privacy page's word for it.

Every claim on this page is checkable, because the whole extension is public under the MIT licence. Read the network calls, audit the permissions, then build the exact thing you just installed.

Auditable

No minified blob to trust. The source that runs in your browser is the source in the repository, and the manifest lists every permission it asks for.

Yours to fork

MIT licensed, so you can change anything, ship your own build, or keep a private fork with the two widgets you actually use.

No way to take it away

No account, no server, no subscription that lapses. Even if this project stopped tomorrow, your copy keeps working and anyone can pick it up.

Browse the source Open an issue
# build the extension yourself
$ git clone https://github.com/thepropotato/open-slate
$ cd open-slate
$ npm install
$ npm run build
 
# then load dist/ at chrome://extensions
# with developer mode turned on
Worth knowing

Two things it can't do.

It can't read your Chrome theme

Chrome doesn't expose an installed theme's colours to extensions, only whether you're in light or dark mode. So "match Chrome" is automatic light/dark, eight palettes, and an accent sampled from your wallpaper. Close, but not the same thing, and worth saying plainly.

It can't use precise location

Chrome refuses to make geolocation optional, and one widget isn't worth a location warning on every install. Weather is placed from an approximate, city-level lookup, accurate enough for a forecast and correctable by typing a town.

Questions

Before you install.

What does it look like the moment I install it?

A search box, one clock, and a grid seeded from your most-visited sites, with nothing to configure before it's useful. Everything else is opt-in: you add widgets you want, and the permissions come with them.

Will it slow my new tab down?

The page is a static bundle loaded from disk with no remote code and no blocking network calls on open. Widgets that fetch (weather, feeds, coin prices) render from a local cache first and refresh behind it.

Why does the feeds widget mention broad host access?

RSS feeds live at addresses only you know, so there's no fixed list to declare. The broad pattern is declared as optional and never requested wholesale: adding a feed asks for that one origin by name. A fresh install holds no host permissions at all, and if you never add a feed you never grant one.

Can I move my setup to another machine?

Export the whole configuration to a file and import it anywhere, or turn on sync per device. There are also theme codes, which carry the look without carrying your tiles, notes or tasks, so you can share an appearance without sharing anything personal.

What happens to my data if I uninstall?

It goes with the extension. Everything lives in Chrome's local storage for this extension and in IndexedDB. There is no server holding a copy, because there is no server. Export first if you want to keep it.

Get it

Take back the page you open most.

Free, MIT licensed, and it works the moment it installs.

Add to Chrome View the source