The idea
The idea came from my phone. On Android, I could arrange app icons, drag them around, put them into folders and move between home screens. I missed that flexibility when I opened a new tab in my browser.
New Tab brings that kind of organisation to bookmarks and shortcuts. I wanted a place I could arrange around the way I work, with the things I use close at hand. The other part of the idea was keyboard control: opening a new tab should not mean reaching for the mouse to get to the next thing.
Who it’s for
I’m building New Tab for power users: people who enjoy organising their workspace and want quick access to the things they use. Shortcuts, folders and screens are ways to make that space their own.
Keyboard control is central to the experience. My aim is for someone to use the extension without having to touch their mouse. That is the direction I’m building towards, alongside the ability to arrange bookmarks and shortcuts in a way that makes sense to them.
Why I picked it
This started with something I was missing myself. My phone let me organise its home screens, and I wanted that same freedom in the browser. I wanted to bring that idea across and make it useful for people who care about productivity and shortcuts.
Speed mattered from the beginning. A new tab is something I open repeatedly, so I wanted the extension to feel as quick as the browser’s own starting page. Adding features while keeping that feeling became an important part of the project.
The journey
The recorded work starts in December 2024. The first version was centred on search. During the first quarter of 2025, it grew into a broader working app, with bookmarks, shortcuts and more ways to personalise the page.
I presented the idea and the app at my company and won Code Week in Q1 2025. That was a milestone before any public release.
The work continued through 2026. Folders, drag-and-drop organisation and keyboard navigation developed further, along with widgets and personalisation. Later work put more attention on responsiveness and the time between opening a tab and being ready to use it. I’m still improving that experience. The extension has not been released to the public yet; I’m planning a Chrome Web Store release.
What was hard
The hardest engineering challenge has been performance. I wanted the flexibility of a customised page while keeping the quick opening experience of a default new tab.
In my own measurements, the page currently takes around 100–120 milliseconds to be ready to use. That is a readiness measurement, not a first-paint figure. Getting below 100 milliseconds remains a target, and I’m continuing to work on it. I don’t consider that part finished.
The other difficult question has been how to monetise the idea. I’m still exploring that. I have an extension I want to put in people’s hands, but I haven’t settled on how it should become a paid product.
What I learned
I got to know more about browser internals and the APIs available to extensions by building features that needed them. The work made me more familiar with the capabilities a browser exposes to a product like New Tab.
Performance has also remained an ongoing part of the work. I’m still trying to bring the time to a usable page closer to the experience I want, rather than treating the current result as finished.
What’s next
Before the public release, I want to add account synchronisation so that a user signing in on multiple devices gets their settings synchronised. I also want to understand how people use New Tab through usage analytics. The Chrome Web Store launch and a way to monetise it are still ahead.