Every developer has opinions about their development environment. Terminal themes, editor fonts, keyboard shortcuts. But there's one piece of the environment that gets strangely little attention: the new tab page.
You open it hundreds of times a day. It flashes on screen for a moment every time you hit Ctrl+T. And yet most developers use the browser default — which shows either a search box with a grid of bookmarks, or (if you're on Firefox) the Pocket feed.
What Do You Actually Need From a New Tab?
I spent time thinking about what information would actually make me more productive if it appeared the moment I opened a new tab. My criteria:
- Loads instantly — Any perceptible delay is worse than the default
- Shows useful information — Not motivational quotes, not a beautiful photo
- Doesn't require interaction — The info should be passively readable
- Doesn't distract — No feed of content to get sucked into
What I settled on: weather and time.
Why Weather + Time?
Weather has a surprisingly practical use case. How many times have you gone to close your laptop for a lunch break and had no idea whether to bring a jacket? Looking at weather in a separate app is a context switch. Having it appear passively on every new tab means you absorb the info without trying.
Time seems obvious — your OS shows it in the menu bar. But multiple time zones is different. If you work with a distributed team, knowing it's 3pm in your timezone but almost midnight for your colleague in Tokyo changes how you think about that Slack message you're about to send.
The Technical Constraints Shape the Design
Building a new tab extension for Firefox taught me something about the relationship between technical constraints and design decisions.
The chrome_url_overrides.newtab API loads your HTML file on every new tab. There's no service worker, no background process — just your HTML/CSS/JS loading fresh each time.
This means:
- No heavy frameworks — React or Vue would be perceptible overhead
-
Storage is local —
browser.storage.localfor settings, no server - External calls are async and never blocking — weather data loads after the tab visually appears
The constraint forced simplicity. The extension is a single HTML file, a CSS file, and a JS file. No build step. No dependencies.
weather-clock-dashboard/
├── dashboard.html (the new tab page)
├── styles.css (all styles)
├── dashboard.js (all logic)
└── manifest.json (extension config)
This also means:
- It loads instantly (no framework parse time)
- It works offline (clock works without network; weather shows cached data)
- The codebase is auditable (a non-minified JS file you can read in 5 minutes)
The Result
Weather & Clock Dashboard is what I built. After a few weeks of daily use:
- I've unconsciously internalized the weather for planning purposes
- I almost never miss a meeting because I'm accidentally surprised by timezones
- I've never once felt like the new tab page was slowing me down
For the Developer Who Wants to Build Their Own
The chrome_url_overrides API in Firefox is genuinely simple:
"chrome_url_overrides": {
"newtab": "your-page.html"
}
Your HTML page gets full access to browser storage, the Extension API, and can make fetch requests. You could build a new tab that shows:
- Your calendar's next event
- Your current GitHub PRs
- Open Jira tickets
- A daily summary of your Slack messages
- Your code metrics
Any of these would be more useful than a grid of bookmarks.
The friction isn't technical. It's deciding what information genuinely improves your day versus what's just noise.
Interested in seeing the source? Weather & Clock Dashboard is on GitHub, MIT licensed.
