The best tools for customizing your Chrome home page

Open a new tab in stock Chrome and you get a search box and a row of shortcut tiles. That’s it. You’ll see this page dozens of times today, and for most people it’s the least considered screen on their computer.

Chrome lets you change the background and rearrange the tiles. Past that, you need an extension. There are plenty, and they aim at different things: some want to calm you down, some want to tame your tabs, some just want to look good. Here are the ones worth knowing and what each is best at.

One note before we start: we make Fornya Haven, which is on this list. We’ve tried to be straight about where it fits and where it doesn’t.

Fornya Haven

Here’s where we come in. We kept running into the same split. The pretty extensions did little beyond looking pretty, and the useful ones looked like admin software. We wanted one page that held your bookmarks, your search and your open tabs, and that you could make look like yours.

Haven’s theme is fully editable, every colour and the interface around it. There are built-in presets to start from, including a plain black and white dark theme, a purple one in the spirit of Discord, a pink one, and a few others. You can change any of them piece by piece. The wallpaper is editable too, so the page can be a photo or something plain.

On the practical side, Haven puts bookmark management on the home page, with search and tab management next to it. This is version one, and we left out weather, quotes and a pile of widgets on purpose. We’d rather do a few things properly than a lot of things loosely. If you want a daily focus prompt like Momentum’s, Haven isn’t that.

Add Fornya Haven to Chrome

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hdeaekgplcphbpkhlcknfnkgiihalgga?utm_source=item-share-cb

Momentum

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/laookkfknpbbblfpciffpaejjkokdgca?utm_source=item-share-cb

Momentum is probably the most famous name in this category. Every new tab shows a large photo, a clock, a quote, and a prompt asking for your main focus today, with a small to-do list tucked underneath. It’s calm and pretty, and it works within a minute of installing.

The free version covers the basics. The more advanced features, like integrations with other task tools, sit behind a paid plan called Momentum Plus. It suits you if you want a gentle nudge each morning and don’t want to configure much. It suits you less if you want to change how the page looks beyond the options it gives you, or if you want the page to get you places faster. It’s closer to a mood than a control panel.

Tabliss

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hipekcciheckooncpjeljhnekcoolahp?utm_source=item-share-cb

Tabliss goes the other way. You build the page from parts: pick a background (a photo, a gradient, something like NASA’s picture of the day), then add widgets for the time, notes, to-dos and quotes. It’s open source, and a community fork called TablissNG has added more widgets and options, including custom search engines.

It’s a good fit for tinkerers. The catch is that you can lose an evening arranging widgets, and the result can feel assembled rather than designed.

Bonjourr

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dlnejlppicbjfcfcedcflplfjajinajd?utm_source=item-share-cb

Bonjourr is a minimalist start page with an iOS-inspired look: a clock, a search bar, quick links and notes, plus a few small widgets like a Pomodoro timer. Its store listing says it collects no data and needs no account, the code is open source, and it was featured in Chrome’s Favorites of 2023.

If you want a clean page that stays out of your way, it’s hard to beat. It does have a house style, though. Changing the look past the options it offers means writing your own CSS, which not everyone wants to do for a start page.

Toby

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hddnkoipeenegfoeaoibdmnaalmgkpip?utm_source=item-share-cb

Toby isn’t really a decoration tool. It turns your new tab into a board of saved tab collections laid out as cards, a bit like Trello for browsing. If you do research, or keep twenty tabs open “for later,” it’s good at getting them off your tab strip and back when you need them.

Two things to know before you commit. It needs an account, and the free plan caps saved tabs at 60, so check the current limits before you move a big pile of tabs in.

How to pick

If you want a daily nudge with no setup, try Momentum. If you like assembling things, try Tabliss. If you want quiet and minimal, Bonjourr. If your real problem is tab overload, look at Toby or Workona: Toby for piles of saved tabs, Workona for switching between projects. If you want a home page that handles bookmarks, search and tabs and also looks exactly how you want, that’s the gap we built Haven for.

Chrome only lets one extension take over the new tab page at a time, so pick one and live with it for a week. Installing and removing these is cheap. If it annoys you by Friday, swap it out.