Nordlys

A new tab page with 21 themes, a living aurora, bookmark folders you arrange yourself, and a search box that does arithmetic.

Nordlys replaces the new tab page. It opens instantly, keeps everything on your machine, and is meant to be looked at rather than got past. This is a beta. Things get removed as well as added — two background scenes and four gradient variants have already gone, each one dropped because it measured as indistinguishable from another rather than because someone disliked it. What does not change without warning is your setup: every upgrade that migrates anything keeps a restore point you can go back to. Bookmarks live in folders you arrange yourself. Drag a tile into another folder, drag folders around, pull a corner to change how many columns a folder has, fold the ones you rarely open into a dock at the bottom. Right click anything to edit it in place. Icons come from a built-in vector set that recognises most sites by domain, or from a favicon, an image URL, a local file, or a monogram. A black logo on a black theme used to disappear. Nordlys now measures every icon against the plate behind it and re-tones only the ones that would vanish, so coloured logos keep their colour. You can override that decision on any bookmark. 21 themes, 11 dark and 10 light. Each one sets the background, the glass tint and the colours of the canvas behind it, so Gruvbox gets an amber sky and OLED Obsidian stays properly black. Follow the system, or pin it to dark or light. If none of the 21 fit, build your own in the theme studio or write CSS directly. Type is split into three slots: the clock and headings, the interface, and monospace. Choose from the bundled faces or from the fonts already installed on your computer. One living scene — the aurora it is named after — your own image or a looping video, stored locally, or a flat theme colour. Motion and Atmosphere dial the aurora from a slow shimmer down to Still, where the scene is painted once and held. If your system asks for reduced motion, that is what you get automatically: the picture, without the movement. The search box uses whichever search engine you have set in Chrome — it does not have one of its own and does not ask you to pick. As you type it offers your own bookmarks, your recent searches, and arithmetic: 45 * 12 + sqrt(144) gets its answer right there, one click to copy. Nothing you type is sent anywhere until you press Enter. A folder can follow one of your browser's bookmark folders instead of being filled in by hand. It mirrors one way, so the browser keeps the data — which also means an update here cannot lose it. Nordlys asks for permission to read bookmarks at the moment you link a folder, never at install. No account, no analytics, no telemetry, no remote code. Settings and bookmarks live in local storage, and the only request the extension makes on its own is for an icon you asked for by pasting its address. Export the lot to JSON whenever you want. Available in English, Russian, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Chinese and Turkish. Open source under the MIT licence: https://github.com/sa1ntsinner/nordlys-tab