Changelog

1.4.0

Added

• Eleven built-in wallpapers at the top of the Wallpaper settings: Dawn, Dusk, Night, Mist, Aurora, Tide, Skyline, Dunes, Pines, Orbit and Contours. They ship with the extension, apply live and set the accent colour. New profiles start on one that follows light and dark.
• Scenes: save the current layout under a name, switch between layouts from Settings or the command palette, and have one apply itself on chosen days and times.
• Recent versions in Settings, so any of your last few saved changes can be restored.
• The command palette opens with recent items and the most useful actions, groups results into sections, and shows keyboard shortcuts.
• A toolbar popup. Add the page you are on as a tile (rename it, link to the page or the whole site, pick the page or folder), or use the quick actions: open a new tab, search, arrange, customise, switch the theme and cycle the wallpaper. Alt+Shift+S opens it, and it is also where you remove a tile you already added.
• Procedural background patterns: dot grid, blueprint grid, diagonal lines, isometric perspective, contour waves, and ambient mesh. Each adapts to your theme palette with configurable scale and intensity, with zero network downloads.
• Quotes and daily wisdom in the greeting widget: switch between traditional greetings, curated quotes across craft, wisdom, and stoicism with author attributions, or your own custom quote, updating on every new tab, hourly, or daily.
• Manual refresh buttons on the crypto and weather widgets.
• "Arrange the page" action in the command palette.
• Layout settings can put widgets above tiles, or the other way round, when the page is in one-page mode.
• A first-run welcome on a fresh install: pick a starting look, choose whether to begin with your most visited sites, then a short tour of search, tiles, the corner bar and the toolbar button, and a three-item checklist that ticks itself. "Take the tour" in the command palette replays it. Existing installs never see it.

Changed

• A new tab opens on search, tiles and a greeting with a clock, over a built-in wallpaper, instead of a single clock. Existing setups are untouched.
• The floating buttons and the extra "+" beside the Widgets and Tiles switch are replaced by one small bar in the bottom-right corner: Add, Arrange and Customise. Hover it to see the labels; it fades when you stop moving the pointer.
• Adding a tile, folder or widget happens in one Add sheet. Paste a link and the tile previews as you type, with your most-visited sites as one-click starting points.
• Arrange mode shows a banner that says what to do, and a configure and a remove button on the widget under the pointer.
• Settings opens as a panel beside your page, which updates as you change things, instead of a dialog with a small preview. The nine sections are grouped into five tabs.
• Settings that offer a choice of words are dropdowns with a chevron, so every row stays on one line at any width. The Save and Discard bar floats clear of the content, which scrolls out from under it. Light and dark is three icon buttons.
• Palettes are drawn as small versions of the real interface.
• Secondary text and borders are easier to read in every palette, and panels have a faint fill so they stand out from the page.
• The seeded Maps tile no longer shows the Google Search logo.
• Twelve fonts, all bundled with the extension so nothing downloads: System, Bricolage Grotesque (the Open Slate font), Inter, DM Sans, Manrope, Space Grotesk, Nunito, Lora, Playfair Display, JetBrains Mono, Fira Code and Caveat. "Grotesk" becomes Inter and "Condensed" returns to the system font. The settings panel and popup use Bricolage Grotesque.
• Add any font from Google Fonts by pasting its link or typing its name. It is fetched from Google when you add it and while you use it; the built-in fonts never touch the network.
• Scrolling over a widget now cascades smoothly to the whole page once it reaches the widget boundary, avoiding stuck scrolling on single-page layouts.
• Notes widget now features a quiet, centered prompt rather than a persistent header placeholder, focusing cleanly on click.
• Tile titles automatically format and capitalize domain names (turning addresses like linear.com into "Linear") when a site has no curated brand logo.
• Right-clicking anywhere on the new tab page - including empty side gutters, wallpaper, and corners - opens Open Slate's own menu, keeping Chrome's browser menu from leaking through on blank space.
• Claude and ChatGPT usage meter refresh buttons now share the same button and icon scale as other widgets.
• A slate shared with Share my slate goes into the community gallery as soon as you file it, with a reply on the issue saying so, or saying what to fix. Editing the issue updates it in the gallery.
• The submission form now asks for the slate's name in its own field, and fills in the title for you.

Fixed

• "Use this slate" in the community gallery opens the slate in the extension. Chrome was blocking the link and showing an invalid page instead.

1.3.0

Added

• Slate codes, which share the arrangement of your widgets the way theme codes already share the look. A code says which widgets are on the grid and where they sit, and nothing else: not the calendar you subscribe to, not the city your weather is set to, not your tiles or notes. Whoever applies it points the widgets at their own. They live in their own Slates section in settings: start from one, browse what others have shared, or share the one you built.
• Community slates, at openslate.byvenu.com/slates, showing what people have shared. Each has a preview drawn from the slate itself, so it cannot show you something other than what you would get. "Use this slate" opens the extension and shows the arrangement on your own new tab, with your wallpaper and theme, before anything changes; nothing is applied until you say so. Browsing asks nothing of the extension, which still makes no request of its own.
• Four starter slates, so a new grid does not have to begin as an empty one. Focus, Dashboard, Reading and Minimal each arrange a handful of widgets that work without any setting up. Applying one replaces your widgets and the shape of the page, leaves your tiles, notes and tasks alone, and asks before it does.
• Icons as an alternative to tiles: a round favicon with the title underneath, the shape a browser's own new tab uses. The settings that only describe a plate - its colour, its proportions, where the title sits on it - step aside while icons are on, rather than staying there doing nothing.
• A wallpaper slideshow can change on every new tab, rather than only on a timer. Shuffled, tabs opened together each get their own picture; in order, each new tab takes the next one. It is its own switch above the interval.
• "Next wallpaper" in the command palette, for when the one on screen is not the one you want and you would rather not wait for the timer. It offers itself only when a slideshow with more than one picture is running, and every open tab follows.

Changed

• Arranging the page is now something you ask for, and the page is otherwise left alone. Tiles and widgets carried a grip and a button in their corners that appeared whenever the pointer crossed them, sitting on top of the favicon or the first line of whatever a widget was drawing. Those are gone. Press the grid button beside the settings cog, right-click and choose Arrange, or press E, and everything loosens at once: drag a tile or a widget from anywhere on it, resize from the corner, and press the same button again - or Escape - when you are finished.
• Right-click now opens a menu wherever you are on the page, with what belongs to the thing under the pointer first - open a tile in a new tab, edit it, remove it, configure a widget - and adding, arranging and the settings below it. Nothing needs to be scrolled to any more.
• Widgets stay live until you arrange them. A widget's face answers clicks, so a drag that started on it would have stolen them; arranging settles that by holding the whole board still for as long as you are moving things.
• Each picture in the wallpaper library asks one question rather than offering everything at once. Running a slideshow, that is whether the picture is in it; otherwise, whether it is the wallpaper. The unlabelled plus that added a picture to a slideshow says so now, and the buttons no longer spill outside the card they belong to.

Fixed

• Using a picture while the wallpaper is a video no longer switches the type. Every file offered "Use" whatever the type was, so choosing a still in video mode quietly moved you to a single image - and the accent colour, which follows the wallpaper, changed with it. A file the current type cannot show now says what it is instead of offering to be used.
• Sync no longer throws away what you are in the middle of changing. A copy pulled from another device replaced everything, unsaved edits included, so with sync on the settings panel could reset itself at any moment. A pull now keeps your edits and brings the rest.
• A settings change no longer occasionally undoes itself. Writes are held back a moment before being stored, so more than one can be waiting at once, and a tab could mistake its own earlier write for another tab's and snap back to it.
• The wallpaper library follows the type you have just picked. Choosing Image while a slideshow was set left every picture still offering to join the slideshow, because the library was reading what was saved rather than what you had changed.
• Settings changed while the panel is open no longer undo work done beside them. Saving wrote the whole panel back, including its copy of things it does not edit, so a picture added to the slideshow could vanish the moment an unrelated switch was saved. Only what you actually changed is written now.
• A wallpaper that cannot be read no longer costs you the rest of the section. One bad value used to discard everything about the background, uploaded pictures included; now only the value itself falls back to its default.
• The search box no longer shifts as you type. The shortcut hint, the Go chip and the clear button used to appear and disappear around the input, changing its width on the first keystroke and again once what you had typed looked like a link. They now hold their places whether or not they are showing.
• Choosing a wallpaper while settings are open now shows up straight away, on both the preview and the page behind it. It was being applied but left hidden behind the settings you had not saved yet, so a picture you had definitely chosen appeared to do nothing until you saved or closed the panel.
• A calendar that will not load now says why. A work calendar that answers with a sign-in page instead of a calendar, an address that has been reset, and a site that cannot be reached are three different problems, and "check the address" was the wrong advice for the one where the address is correct.
• A calendar shared as free or busy only now says so, rather than showing a day of meetings all called "Busy" with nothing to click. The titles and joining links are removed before the calendar ever reaches the browser, so the widget now explains that and points at the sharing setting that controls it.

1.2.0

Added

• A Spotify widget: the track, the artist, how far through it you are, and play, pause and skip. The buttons reach whichever device is actually playing - your phone or the desktop app, not only this browser - so you can change the song without going to find the tab. When nothing is playing it shows the last track you played, and pressing play picks up on the device you left off on, asking which one if there is any doubt. Starting and skipping need Spotify Premium, and seeing what is playing does not. It asks Spotify only while the tab is in front of you.
• A connectors page, built into the extension, for the setup that has to happen outside it. Spotify grants playback access per registered application and its free tier covers only a handful of named testers, so the widget walks you through creating your own instead: the page links to the right place, gives you the exact line to paste, and takes the client ID at the end. About two minutes, once. Nothing is registered on your behalf and no credentials ship in the extension, so the access is yours to revoke whenever you like.
• Search suggestions from the engine you actually search with, on from the start. Google works straight away; any other engine asks for access to its suggestions endpoint the first time you pick it.

Changed

• Settings open over the new tab instead of replacing it, so closing them puts you back where you were rather than on a blank page.
• The themed background is painted before the first stylesheet loads, so opening a tab no longer flashes white on the way in.

1.1.0

Added

• Claude and ChatGPT usage widgets, reading spend and rate limits from the session you are already signed in to. No API key, nothing about your conversations, and the numbers stay on your device.
• A calendar that reads ICS feeds, with a day view drawn on an hour axis and the meeting link pulled out of the event.
• Tasks take priorities and due dates from the line as you type it - ! for priority, @ friday for a date - and filter down by either.

Changed

• Anything that would destroy stored data now asks first, overwrites included.
• The wallpaper in use is named rather than merely tinted, so it is tellable apart from the other slides in a slideshow.

Fixed

• An arranged layout survives being arranged, instead of being re-packed on the next load.
• The page scrolls as a whole and its top stays reachable, and a large tile count no longer divides the band indefinitely.

1.0.0

First public release.

Added

• A speed dial of tiles drawn with each site's own logo, in folders and across named pages, opened by position with Alt+1 to Alt+9.
• A widget canvas of square cells with five standard sizes, where growing or dropping a widget moves whatever was in the way at every window size.
• A wallpaper engine - solid, gradient, image, video or slideshow - with dim, blur, brightness, saturation, zoom, vignette and slow drift.
• A search band with bang syntax and a built-in calculator, and a command palette over tabs, bookmarks and history.
• Widgets for the clock, weather, calendar, notes, tasks, a timer, feeds, crypto prices, and your own browser data.
• Settings sync, and an export and import of everything stored. [1.4.0]: https://github.com/thepropotato/open-slate/compare/v1.3.0...v1.4.0 [1.3.0]: https://github.com/thepropotato/open-slate/compare/v1.2.0...v1.3.0 [1.2.0]: https://github.com/thepropotato/open-slate/compare/v1.1.0...v1.2.0 [1.1.0]: https://github.com/thepropotato/open-slate/compare/v1.0.0...v1.1.0 [1.0.0]: https://github.com/thepropotato/open-slate/releases/tag/v1.0.0