Aurora

A calm, local-first new-tab dashboard. No accounts, no tracking, no backend.

Aurora is a calm, local-first new-tab dashboard. No accounts, no backend, no tracking of any kind — everything it stores lives only on your device, and the developer never sees any of it. See aurora-newtab's PRIVACY.md for the complete, audited policy. FEATURES - Clock & greeting, with world clocks and a countdown to whatever date you're counting down to. - Weather — current conditions and a next-12-hours forecast, from your device location or a searched city, powered by the free, keyless Open-Meteo API. No API key to configure, no sign-up. - A search bar (Google, DuckDuckGo, or Bing — your choice) and a small drag-to-reorder grid of quick links with favicons. - Background photos: a bundled, hand-curated set of landscape and aurora photos that rotates daily, your own uploaded photo gallery, or a flat gradient. - An optional bookmarks bar — your browser's actual bookmarks, rendered as folder and favicon chips. Off by default; reads your bookmarks, never modifies them. - To-do lists, a Pomodoro-style focus timer with a chime, and a small autosaving notes scratchpad. - A command palette (Ctrl+K / Cmd+K) to jump to a link, switch theme, search the web, or quick-add a to-do. - Three themes — Aurora, Glass, and Mono — and a rearrange mode (press and hold, or Settings → Layout) to move any widget wherever you want it on the page. - Full keyboard accessibility throughout. - Back up everything to a JSON file from Settings → Data, and restore it later — a local export/import, not a cloud sync. PRIVACY, THE ACTUAL DIFFERENTIATOR Most new-tab extensions are free because they sell your browsing data or your default search traffic. Aurora doesn't have a business model that needs your data, because it doesn't have a business model at all — it's a dashboard, not a data pipeline. Concretely: - No account, no sign-up, no login, ever. - No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no ad network. - No backend server of any kind — there is nothing for your data to be collected BY, even if we wanted to. - Everything you configure (settings, links, to-dos, notes, focus timer, world clocks, countdowns, your saved location, layout) stays in Chrome's local storage on your device. Uploaded background photos stay in local IndexedDB, as blobs, never uploaded anywhere. - The only network calls Aurora ever makes are to Open-Meteo (for weather and city search) and, once, to BigDataCloud (to label "Use my location" with a real place name) — both free, keyless services, sent only the coordinates or search text needed for that one lookup. Full detail in PRIVACY.md. - Bookmarks is an OPTIONAL permission, requested only when you turn that widget on — never at install. Location is granted at install (Chrome doesn't allow it to be requested any other way) but only ever READ the instant you click "Use my location" — never in the background, and never just for typing a city name. Read the full privacy policy: https://github.com/jcooler/aurora-newtab/blob/main/PRIVACY.md