Open Slate

A customizable speed dial and dashboard for your new tab page.

A blank tab is a blank page. Sketch on it. You open a new tab dozens of times a day and never chose what's on it. Open Slate replaces it with a speed dial and dashboard - search, tiles, widgets and a wallpaper, with close to everything about the look under your control. A first-run welcome helps you pick a starting look, then a short tour shows the search box, the tiles and the controls on the real page, and a three-item checklist ticks itself as you try them. Skip it any time; "Take the tour" in the command palette brings it back. TILES THAT LOOK LIKE THE SITES THEY OPEN Logos for 233 sites come bundled, drawn in the brand's own colour. Every other site gets its favicon rendered large on a plate tinted by sampling that favicon, so the grid stays coherent even for sites nobody has a logo for. Drag to reorder, drop onto a folder to file it away, split tiles across named pages, or open by position with Alt+1 to Alt+9. EIGHTEEN WIDGETS, AND NONE OF THEM OVERLAP A grid of square cells with five standard sizes that widgets snap to, the way phone widgets do. Growing or dropping one moves whatever was in the way - at every window size, not just the one you are looking at. Clock (ten faces), weather, calendar, notes, greeting, tasks (priorities, due dates and filters, all typed rather than clicked), timer (pomodoro, countdown, stopwatch), RSS feeds, crypto prices, Claude and ChatGPT usage, Spotify, recently closed tabs, most visited, open tabs with a duplicate finder, bookmarks, history and downloads. SAVE ANY PAGE WITHOUT OPENING A NEW TAB Click the toolbar button (or press Alt+Shift+S) to add the page you are on as a tile. Rename it, link to the page or the whole site, and choose which page or folder it goes in. The popup also opens a new tab, searches, arranges, opens settings, switches the theme and cycles the wallpaper. MAKE IT YOURS Eleven built-in wallpapers ship with the extension, or use a solid colour, a gradient, a pattern, an image, a video or a slideshow, with dim, blur, brightness, saturation, zoom, vignette and a slow-drift option. Eight palettes, automatic light and dark, a corner radius from fully round to fully square, four surface styles, three densities, twelve bundled fonts (or add any Google Font by name or link), and an accent that can be sampled from your wallpaper. Settings open in a panel beside the page, so every change shows as you make it and nothing is kept until you save. Every preference is searchable and applies across every open tab. Arrange the page by dragging, put widgets above tiles or the other way round, and save layouts as scenes you can switch between, or have one apply itself on chosen days and times. Your last few saved settings can be restored from a list. Export your whole configuration to a file, or share a theme code that carries the look and a slate code that carries the arrangement - neither carrying your tiles, notes or tasks. Four starter layouts get a new grid going in one click. IT ASKS FOR NOTHING No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no identifiers. No content scripts - the extension runs on its own page and nowhere else, so it cannot read the sites you visit. It installs with eight permissions, none of which can read the content of a page you visit (the toolbar button's activeTab only sees the current page's address and title when you click it); tabs, history, bookmarks, downloads, sessions and access to any site are requested the moment you add the widget that needs one, and declining leaves the rest working. Settings and tiles are stored locally. Wallpapers you add live in IndexedDB and are never uploaded. Sync is off unless you turn it on, per device. The one optional request is a Google Font you add yourself: that stylesheet is fetched from Google, and only when you add one. TWO THINGS WORTH KNOWING Chrome does not expose an installed theme's colours to extensions, only whether you are in light or dark mode - so "match Chrome" here means automatic light/dark, eight palettes and a wallpaper-sampled accent. Geolocation is never declared and never called. The weather widget places itself from an approximate, city-level lookup, which you can correct by typing a town. Free and open source.