Open Slate

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

Your most-opened page, finally yours. 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 — tiles, widgets and a wallpaper engine, with close to everything about the look under your control. 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. FIFTEEN 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, recently closed tabs, most visited, open tabs with a duplicate finder, bookmarks, history and downloads. SEARCH AND A COMMAND PALETTE 23 search engines with bang shortcuts (!yt cats), address detection so typing a host navigates, and an inline calculator. Cmd/Ctrl+K searches your tabs, tiles, bookmarks, history and every settings command at once. Suggestions come from your own data — nothing is sent anywhere as you type. MAKE IT YOURS Eight palettes, automatic light and dark, a corner radius from fully round to fully square, four surface styles, three densities, and an accent that can be sampled from your wallpaper. Wallpaper can be a solid colour, a gradient, an image, a video or a slideshow, with dim, blur, brightness, saturation, zoom, vignette and a slow-drift option. Every preference is searchable and applies live across every open tab. Export your whole configuration to a file, or share a theme code that carries the look without carrying your tiles, notes or tasks. 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 four permissions; tabs, history, bookmarks, downloads and sessions are requested the moment you add the widget that needs one, and declining leaves the rest working. Settings and tiles are stored locally. Wallpapers live in IndexedDB and are never uploaded. Sync is off unless you turn it on, per device. 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.