About New Tab Studio

New Tab Studio is a browser extension that hands the new tab page back to you. Instead of a search box and a grid of places you have already been, you get a blank page and 33 widgets to put on it — countdowns, clocks, task lists, habit trackers, notes, weather, photos — each dragged wherever you want and styled however you like.

It has been in the Chrome Web Store since 2019 — the data format inside it is on its seventh revision, and the numbering started at four, so there was a while before that too. Around 40,000 people use it, and it holds a 4.9 rating there. It runs on Chrome and on every browser that installs Chrome extensions: Edge, Opera, Brave and Vivaldi.

Why we built it

The new tab page is the most-viewed screen most people own. Dozens of times a day, every working day, identical for everyone, telling you nothing. That is a lot of attention spent on a page that does no work at all.

The first version did exactly one thing: it put a countdown there. People pointed it at exams, thesis deadlines and release dates, and it turned out that seeing the number of days left forty times a day genuinely changes how you treat those days. Everything since — habit trackers, task lists, workspaces — comes from the same idea. Put the thing that matters where you cannot avoid it.

How it works

Widgets go where you put them. No grid, no slots. Position is stored relative to the page rather than in pixels, so plugging in a second monitor does not scatter your layout. Every widget takes the same style controls — font, size, colour, background with transparency, shadow, corners — which is what lets a page look designed rather than assembled.

Everything you write lives in your browser. Your layout, your task lists, your notes and your countdown dates are stored on your own machine and are not uploaded to us. No account is required to use the extension.

Some widgets do need the network to do their job — weather, wallpapers, currency rates, the dictionary, search suggestions — and the extension reports anonymous usage events, the ordinary kind that tells us which widgets people actually add. None of that carries what you typed into a note or a task.

There is no sync between devices, and that follows from the same decision: your page is a single document in your browser's storage, rewritten every time you change anything, which is far too large and too chatty for a browser sync quota. Everything staying with you is the upside; moving it yourself is the price.

Themes

A finished page can be published as a theme, and anyone opening the link installs it in one click — wallpaper, widgets, positions, styling. The theme gallery is built entirely from pages people made and chose to share, and it is the fastest way to a page that looks finished. Take something close to what you want, change the dates and lists to yours, done.

Free and PRO

The free version lets you add three widgets by hand, with every widget type available, plus three separate workspaces. No trial period, no countdown to a paywall, no feature that stops working after a week.

The part worth knowing: widgets that arrive with an installed theme are not counted. A page from the gallery carrying a dozen widgets works on the free plan — what costs is assembling one yourself.

PRO removes the widget limit, allows unlimited habit trackers, changes how many workspaces you can have, and unlocks daily and weekly countdown repeats, the workday countdown and timezones on the analog clock. It is a single payment, and it is the only thing we charge for.

Contact

Questions about payments, PRO or partnerships go to our support page, which also links to the idea hub where you can file bugs and request features.

What gets built from those requests is visible in the extension itself: countdowns that skip weekends, a countdown to the end of the working day, holiday presets, calendar import over a plain iCal link instead of a sign-in flow. Nobody builds those speculatively.