A Chrome Extension to Make Any Website Content a Widget on Your New Tab Start Page, and Heaps More - New Tab Widgets

Hey OzBargain, long time lurker first time poster. I wanted to share with you all a Chrome extension i've been working on on the side for the past 5 years. Lots of love has been put into it as it was built for myself to make my new tab start page a bit more customizable, initially to control my Philip Hue lights. It's become a lot more than that now somehow, I didn't think i'd sink as much hours into it as I have when I first started it, and 5 years later i'm really proud of it and decided to see if I can turn it in to something bigger this year :)

Main notable features:

  • OzBargain feed widget (front page deals for now, but looking to make it more customizable)
  • FuelWatch fuel price widgets for Perth
  • Control Philips Hue lights (scene widget, group widget)
  • turn any website content in to widgets via an iframe and select only the info you want to display (check out the demo, i make an Australian open match schedule widget and a crypto price widget from binance)
  • weather forecasts, bookmark links, world clocks, Spotify playback control, sticky notes, Google Calendar widget and heaps more

Quick 3 min demo on YouTube

Extension on Chrome Web Store

New Tab Widgets Website

No email is required for free users and you can use the extension straight away after installing from the Chrome web store. Free users can create up to 3 pages, and up to 25 widgets.

There is an optional 5 USD subscription to unlock unlimited pages, unlimited widgets and cloud syncing though not required to get started and for most people the free tier is plenty.

Hope it comes in handy for many of you as much as it's come in handy for me.

@mods i tried filling in the store domain field but i get a "Store does not exist in database" error

Related Stores

newtabwidgets.com
newtabwidgets.com

Comments

  • Looks extremely useful! Will boot up Chrome and check it out. Unfortunately I'm pretty well sold on Firefox these days and not too keen on Chrome.

    I've been using a plugin called Tabliss which allows some customisation of the "start page" but nothing this serious and useful.

    • Tabliss is cool but yes it is quite basic, quite similar to Infinity and Momentum. Thanks for the feedback :) I do have plans on making it available for Firefox soon now that they support manifest v3

  • Looking at the privacy policy here "Non-Personal Information: We may automatically collect non-identifiable information about your use of the Extension, such as browser type, operating system, and usage data (e.g., pages viewed, clicks, and other actions within the Extension). This data is anonymized and used to improve the Extension's performance."
    and
    "We may integrate third-party services into the Extension (e.g., analytics providers) to help us understand how the Extension is used. These third-party providers may have access to non-personal information collected by the Extension and are subject to their own privacy policies."

    How is the data anonymized? Is it really necessary to collect information about pages viewed to improve the performance? I just don't want my electic porn history being recorded by random internet widget dudes. Or third party analytics companies.

    • Pages viewed is only for our website/api for server traffic logging, not external pages viewed/other websites beyond our control.

      The app uses a third party error tracking software called Sentry (which is common in tech/software, you can find their privacy policy here https://sentry.io/privacy/). Essentially it allows us to be aware of issues that arise and proactively fix them rather than waiting for users to report issues.

      Most likely, they would generate some random id as a 'fingerprint', and this id is used to know how many users an issue might be affecting, how many times it's been reported by different users/fingerprints etc.

      We ourselves don't collect or store any user data beyond the scope of the extension/new tab page, and we don't collect or store any data on our own servers for free users at all; all data is stored on your own device for free users.

      I understand your concerns about privacy so happy to answer any other questions you may have :)

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