Minimal Chrome Tab

For when the default new tab has already annoyed you.

A calm, resource-friendly replacement for your browser's new tab page.

Shows the current time and how far you are through the day, week, month, year – and your year of life. Nothing else. No feeds, no widgets, no spyware.

Live demo · Install · Features · Development

Light mode

Dark mode

Why

One day I realized the default new tab keeps running – eating memory and CPU – even when I'm not looking at it. For a page that mostly shows a search box I rarely touch, that felt ridiculous.

So I replaced it with a single, quiet screen that suspends itself the moment the tab loses focus, and wakes up instantly when you come back. It's the new tab page as it should be: there when you need it, invisible when you don't.

✨ Features

• 🪶 Lightweight, all the way down – easy on resources, minimal permissions, zero clutter.
• 💅 Easy on the eyes – clean typography and thoughtful spacing, and it never tries to sell you anything.
• ⚡️ Blazing fast – tiny bundle, instant first paint.
• 🕵️ Private by design – no analytics, no tracking, no network calls.
• 🕒 Time at a glance – current date and clock, updated to the second.
• 📊 Life in progress – how much of the day, week, month, and year has elapsed – and your year of life.
• 📐 Pick a layout – compact bars, detailed bars, or a single horizontal sweep.
• 🌓 Light & dark – follows your OS theme automatically, or lock it to one.
• 🔋 Suspends when idle – pauses all work when the tab isn't focused, so it costs nothing in the background.

📦 Install

The extension is distributed straight from GitHub Releases – no store account required. You load it unpacked; it takes about a minute.

Chrome, Edge & other Chromium browsers

1. Grab a build:
   • Stable – download minimal-chrome-tab.zip from the latest release.
   • Bleeding edge – the auto-published nightly build, rebuilt from main.
2. Unzip it somewhere permanent (deleting the folder uninstalls the extension).
3. Open chrome://extensions (or edge://extensions).
4. Turn on Developer mode (top-right).
5. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.
6. Open a new tab. 🎉

Tip

Prefer to build it yourself? See Building from source, then run Load unpacked on the generated dist/ folder.

Firefox

Firefox only runs signed extensions permanently, so an unpacked install is temporary – it's cleared on restart. To try it out:

1. Build the extension (see Building from source).
2. Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox.
3. Click Load Temporary Add-on and pick the manifest.json inside the dist/ folder.

🧰 Development

Prerequisites: Node.js 22 or newer (an active LTS is recommended) and pnpm.

pnpm i        # install dependencies
pnpm dev      # start the Vite dev server with hot reload

Useful scripts:

Command	What it does
pnpm dev	Dev server with hot reload
pnpm build	Production build into dist/
pnpm test	Lint + typecheck + unit tests (everything)
pnpm test:unit	Unit tests only (Vitest)
pnpm lint	ESLint
pnpm typecheck	TypeScript checks

📦 Building from source

pnpm i
pnpm build

The bundled extension lands in dist/, ready to be loaded unpacked (see Install).

🧱 Tech stack

SolidJS · TypeScript · Vite · Panda CSS · Valibot · Chrome Extension Manifest V3.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please keep changes small and focused, follow Conventional Commits, and run pnpm test before opening a pull request. UI changes should include a screenshot.

License

MIT © Maxim Khvatalin