Ask HN: Show me your New Tab

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Posted by u/vladstudio 3 years ago

so I'm planning a new tiny web app to scratch my own itches, based on something I did before [0], but:

- a remote web app;

- available for any browser, including mobile;

- managed collections of links (obviously), quick notes, world clocks

- workspaces, or projects

- keyboard driven filtering (a-la Raycast or Alfred).

It got me thinking – how is everybody else using New tab? What is on your new tab page? Ideally, if you can share a screenshot, e.g. [1], I'd appreciate it a lot.

[0] https://new-tab.vlad.studio/

[1] https://postimages.org/ - you can simply Ctrl-V there.

TechBro8615 · 3 years ago

I use about:blank (empty page) via this extension. [0]

I don't need a new distraction every time I open a new tab.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab-page...

vladstudio · 3 years ago

thanks! What do you usually do after Ctrl-T?

TechBro8615 · 3 years ago

I type the URL of the website I want to visit into the URL bar. Usually I only need to type a few characters to find the match. I also have autocomplete and preloading disabled, so that text I enter is not sent to any remote server before I press the return key.

from · 3 years ago

  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
    <head>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
      <title>New Tab</title>
      <style>
        html {
          background-color: #3a3a3a;
        }
      </style>
    </head>
  </html>

vladstudio · 3 years ago

noted, thanks!

nouryqt · 3 years ago

I use the Tabliss[1] add-on as my new tab and set it to show me a new unsplash background every time instead of every 15 minutes by default and to show me the local weather in the middle. Looks like this right now: https://i.imgur.com/YRGD0gB.png

[1]: https://tabliss.io/

vladstudio · 3 years ago

thanks for the link! (and the screenshot too)

saghm · 3 years ago

I wrote a small page that displays a list of "favorites" supplied by the query string that I can "click" with a given keyboard shortcut[1]. This lets me just do <ctrl+t> followed by "0" to go to my first shortcut, "1", for the second, and then going into letters with "a", "b", "c", "d", etc. if there are more than ten (I've never had anywhere close to 36 things that I check often enough to want a minimal shortcut too, but I'm sure someone with the need could come up with some way to modify it to work in a way they liked). I had a Chrome extension that provided a new tab page like this years ago, but when switching to Firefox and not finding something similar, I realized that it wouldn't be too hard to implement it in a browser-independent way.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/saghm/6caf46436f204199d622d6c4d6a41c...

fuball63 · 3 years ago

When I gave up social media sites, I created a little site that has some blogs and sites that are interesting to look at, and my new tab page is set to that.

Yahoo initially began as a links directory, and I thought that was a nice idea, so I made Yayhoo: https://bmsauer.github.io/yayhoo/

I like it a lot. I probably need to update it because I haven't done so in a while.

vladstudio · 3 years ago

nice! Links in columns, never fails, always works well.

comprev · 3 years ago

As I own "old" hardware - iPhone 7; MBA (2017) i5/8GB/256; iPad Air (3rd gen) - I always use a blank page as both start page and new tab.

I've found the overhead in processing the "smart" widgets/links makes the device feel much slower, and was a constant reminder how "old" my hardware is.

vladstudio · 3 years ago

noted! How do you manage the pages that you visit often?

comprev · 3 years ago

Browser history or favourites.

I found that having a list of frequently visited sites dramatically reduced the number I would visit, including news sources. After a while I realised my "view" of the world/current affairs was from a narrow perspective simply because of the echo chamber that "top 5 frequently visited websites" produced.

gomako · 3 years ago

https://papier.app/ I find it good for keeping temporary notes and to do lists. More than anything I am opening new tabs so it's great to remind me. I us nvAlt for note taking and it's quite a natural extension.

emrox · 3 years ago

On Chrome (browser I use for development) I use the Google Arts & Culture Extension, to have see something nice while working (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-arts-cultur...)

On Firefox (my main browser for all non-dev related things) I just use the main screen with the shortcuts - some of them sticky, most are just often visited pages gathered by the browser itself