A private dashboard that replaces Chrome's empty new tab with 25+ integrated tools. Search, weather, news, AI chat, radio, finance — all connected, all yours.
Most new tab extensions give you a wallpaper and a clock. We built something different.
kNewTab is 25+ tools that talk to each other. Save a search result to your notes. Turn a bookmark into a task. Listen to internet radio while a procedural landscape pulses to the music. Nothing lives in a silo.
$4/month to see your own bookmarks?
We'd never.
Every tool in kNewTab is aware of the others. Data flows naturally between widgets, so you never copy, paste, or switch tabs.
A full meta search engine in your new tab. Web, images, and video results from multiple sources — no ads, no tracking. Group by domain, preview images in a lightbox, pin results to a tab.
Hourly charts, 7-day forecast, live radar, air quality, pollen, space weather, and NWS storm alerts with audio. Weather Pulse gives you rotating insight cards at a glance.
Pick your topics and get rotating headline cards with full images. Add feeds from 50+ curated sources or any RSS URL. Stay informed without opening another app.
Capture ideas the moment they happen. Markdown formatting, linked web pages, file attachments. Use the scratch pad on the widget face for quick notes without opening the editor.
Subtasks, due dates, priorities, Kanban board, linked pages. Color-coded urgency with overdue warnings. Turn anything into a task with one click — the page link comes with it.
World clock with a day/night map, countdown timers, stopwatch with laps, Pomodoro sessions, date countdowns, and "On This Day" from Wikipedia. Six tools in one widget.
Top sites, pinned tab groups, recently closed tabs, and widget shortcuts — all in one bar. macOS-style magnification on hover, four visual styles, and it adapts to whatever you're doing.
Browse bookmarks in tree, list, or grid view. Group by folder, domain, or date. Spot stale links automatically. Plus a full history browser with timeline view and domain clustering.
Chat with local AI models via Ollama. Streaming responses, conversation history, model picker. Your conversations never leave your device — it's all localhost.
CoinGecko-powered watchlist with sparkline charts, price alerts, and portfolio tracking. Track Bitcoin, Ethereum, and thousands of tokens right from your dashboard.
SomaFM + Radio Browser: 30,000+ stations worldwide. Browse by genre, save favorites, see now-playing info. Background playback while you work on your dashboard.
Drag-and-drop widget grid. Unsplash backgrounds. Four dock styles. Multiple widget pages. Adjustable sizing, spacing, and colors. Your new tab should feel like yours.
No accounts. No tracking. No cloud storage.
Your data never leaves your computer.
ksearch is a full meta search engine right in your new tab. Results from multiple sources, grouped by domain so you can see who's saying what. Preview images in a built-in lightbox. Watch videos without leaving the page.
Found something worth keeping? Save it to Notes with one click. Turn it into a task. Add it to your bookmarks. Everything stays connected.
Not just temperature and a sun icon. kNewTab gives you hourly forecasts, a 7-day outlook, live radar, air quality, pollen levels, and space weather — all in one overlay.
When the National Weather Service issues a storm alert for your area, you'll see it immediately. Turn on audio forecasts and kNewTab will read the conditions aloud. Weather Pulse shows rotating insight cards on the widget face.
Not a static wallpaper — a procedural, animated landscape that changes with the time of day, the weather outside, and even the music you're playing.
Watch aurora borealis dance across the night sky. See rain streak down and snow accumulate into drifts with tiny snowmen. Hot air balloons drift past. The sun tracks your real-world position. And when you connect a music tab, the mountains pulse to the bass.
Use what you want, hide the rest.
Recent downloads on your new tab. Sort by date, size, or type. Open, reveal in folder, or clear — without Chrome's download page.
Save open tab groups to your new tab. Restore them later, add pages manually, keep research sessions organized across days.
Rotating quotes that change with each new tab. Something to think about while your coffee brews. Curated, never repetitive.
Unified bookmarks, reading list, and tab groups in a Chrome sidebar. Everything organized in one place, always accessible.
Live day/night map with city pins. Add cities, compare time zones. Great for remote teams or checking if your friend is awake.
Browse thousands of high-res photos and set them as your background. New ones daily, or keep your favorites.
Most visited sites, right where you need them. Quick access without bookmarking. The dock pulls these in automatically.
Focus sessions with Pomodoro, countdown timers with dock badges, a stopwatch with laps. Six time tools in one widget.
Resize any widget. Drag it anywhere. Multiple pages of widgets. CSS-native grid that's buttery smooth.
JSON backup with optional AES-256 encryption. Cross-device transfer. Your data, your backup, your control.
Recent downloads on your new tab. Sort by date, size, or type. Open, reveal in folder, or clear — without Chrome's download page.
Save open tab groups to your new tab. Restore them later, add pages manually, keep research sessions organized across days.
Rotating quotes that change with each new tab. Something to think about while your coffee brews. Curated, never repetitive.
Unified bookmarks, reading list, and tab groups in a Chrome sidebar. Everything organized in one place, always accessible.
Live day/night map with city pins. Add cities, compare time zones. Great for remote teams or checking if your friend is awake.
Browse thousands of high-res photos and set them as your background. New ones daily, or keep your favorites.
Most visited sites, right where you need them. Quick access without bookmarking. The dock pulls these in automatically.
Focus sessions with Pomodoro, countdown timers with dock badges, a stopwatch with laps. Six time tools in one widget.
Resize any widget. Drag it anywhere. Multiple pages of widgets. CSS-native grid that's buttery smooth.
JSON backup with optional AES-256 encryption. Cross-device transfer. Your data, your backup, your control.
Every detail is adjustable.
Because it's your browser.
This isn't "pick a theme from three options." Every widget, every layout, every pixel is yours to control.
Browse Unsplash from settings. Search by keyword, preview at full resolution. Or go dynamic with a procedural animated landscape that reacts to weather and music.
Glass, solid, minimal, or floating — the dock adapts to your aesthetic. Magnification on hover, custom sections, overflow shelves. It's a command bar that looks the way you want.
Resize any widget. Drag it anywhere. Multiple pages of widgets (sub-grids). The grid is CSS-native and buttery smooth.
The dock isn't just an app launcher — it's a command palette. Search bookmarks, jump to a widget, open a tab group, or start a timer. All from the keyboard.
ksearch responds to single keypresses. Start typing the moment your new tab opens and results appear instantly.
We don't have analytics. We don't run servers you log into. We can't see your data even if we wanted to. That's by design.
No tracking scripts, no page views, no event logging. We have zero visibility into how you use kNewTab.
No sign-up, no login, no profiles. Install it and start using it. Your identity is yours.
Your notes, todos, settings, and history never leave your computer. Everything is stored locally by Chrome.
Your data lives in Chrome's local storage on your device. It never touches a server. For disk-level protection, enable BitLocker (Windows) or FileVault (Mac).
This is Version 1.3.
And we're just getting started.
kNewTab started as a weekend project and became something real. We're actively building, fixing, and shipping new features every week.
25+ integrated tools, private search, weather station, living landscape, AI chat, internet radio, finance, dock, notes, tasks, RSS, and deep customization.
Zen mode with breathing exercises, widget pages polish, contextual onboarding, performance tuning, and more ways to customize.
Your new tab should be the smartest page in your browser. We're building toward that — one feature at a time.
A brutally honest look at what happens when one person decides to build 25+ tools into a new tab page. Spoiler: things break.
142 files. One commit. A clock widget, a theme system, and a dream. The kind of commit that makes senior engineers physically ill.
Built a full meta-search engine into a browser tab. Self-hosted SearXNG, custom UI with image lightbox, video previews, domain grouping, instant answers. Because apparently just linking to DuckDuckGo wasn't ambitious enough.
Built a new tab replacement. Clicking search results opened... a blank tab. The most ironic bug in the history of Chrome extensions. Fixed in commit 1786113.
macOS-style dock magnification using cosine interpolation with 80ms ease-out, spring-back animation on mouse leave, staggered expand/collapse with per-item delays. Took three rewrites. Worth it.
new Date("2026-02-06") in a US timezone gives you February 5th. Because JavaScript parses bare date strings as UTC midnight, which rolls back in any timezone west of Greenwich. Fixed by appending T00:00:00 to force local parsing. Classic.
Widget positions wouldn't save. Hours of debugging. Turns out Svelte 5's $state wraps everything in Proxy objects, and chrome.storage.local.set() silently refuses to serialize Proxies. Had to deep-clone to plain objects before every save.
Aurora probability at your exact coordinates via NOAA's OVATION model. Solar flare summaries. Earth-directed CME tracking. A Kp index semicircular gauge. NASA's DONKI feed in a scrollable notification panel. In a new tab page. Why not.
Svelte 5's $effect tracks every reactive variable you read inside it. If you accidentally read and write the same state, it re-triggers forever. Found this bug three separate times in three different widgets. The fix is always untrack(). We never remember.
The privacy page proudly claimed data was "encrypted at rest." Chrome's local storage is not encrypted. Had to rewrite the entire privacy section. The lesson: don't claim things you haven't verified.
Shipped 50+ curated RSS feeds. Two of them were Reuters. Reuters eliminated RSS feeds six years ago. Also, AP News was using an unreliable proxy that returned 403s. The curated sources were curated by someone who didn't check if they worked.
The audio weather forecast has a life-safety override. If the National Weather Service issues a Tornado Warning for your area, the normal forecast is replaced with urgent survival instructions: safe place, shoes, goggles, helmet, flashlight. Then it says "go go go." Because some features matter more than others.
Chrome's Web Speech API silently stops speaking after ~15 seconds. No error, no event. It just... stops. The fix: pause and resume the utterance every 14 seconds in a keepalive loop. A hack so ugly it deserves its own commit message.
Infinite scroll on the history view caused a crash: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'prev'). The scroll handler fired during Svelte's DOM reconciliation cycle, causing re-entrant state mutations that corrupted the internal linked list. Fixed with requestAnimationFrame and await tick().
The landing page lives in the same repo as the extension. Vite's file watcher saw every website edit, rebuilt the extension, and wiped the dist/ folder. Every. Single. Time. We fixed it five times before finding the actual cause.
170 Svelte components. 78 TypeScript files. 25+ integrated tools. A private search engine. A weather station with space weather. A procedural landscape with snowmen. A dock with physics. And a landing page that keeps accidentally nuking the build. We're just getting started.
kNewTab is free. No accounts. No subscriptions. No strings. Just a better new tab.
Last updated: February 23, 2026
kNewTab is a Chrome extension that replaces your new tab page. Your data stays on your device. We don't have accounts, we don't build profiles, and we don't know who you are.
kNewTab does not collect, store, or transmit personal data to any server we control. There are no analytics, telemetry, cookies, or fingerprinting. We have zero visibility into how you use the extension.
When you search from the Search Dock, your query goes directly to whichever engine you've selected. kNewTab does not intercept or log these queries.
ksearch is an optional built-in engine powered by SearXNG, an open-source meta-search engine. Your search query, category, page, time range, and SafeSearch preference are sent to a private instance. The server does not log queries, store results, or track users. No cookies or identifiers are attached.
Search history (opt-in, off by default) is stored locally and never transmitted.
The News widget uses the same private meta-search server to fetch headlines. Only your topic queries are sent — no location data, IP addresses, or personal identifiers.
kNewTab calls the following third-party APIs when you use specific features. No personal identifiers are sent — only the minimum data each service needs.
| Service | Data Sent | Feature |
|---|---|---|
| Open-Meteo | Coordinates, unit preference | Weather forecast, air quality, ensemble model |
| BigDataCloud | Coordinates | City name display |
| NWS (weather.gov) | Coordinates | US weather alerts |
| Windy | Coordinates (in iframe URL) | Radar / wind / temperature map embed |
| Sunrise-Sunset.org | Coordinates | Sunrise/sunset times |
| NASA DONKI | Date range | Solar flares, CMEs, geomagnetic storms |
| NOAA SWPC | Coordinates (aurora only) | Kp index, aurora probability |
| CoinGecko | Coin IDs, search queries | Cryptocurrency prices and charts |
| SomaFM | None | Internet radio channels and now-playing |
| Radio Browser | Search queries, station clicks | Internet radio station directory |
| Wikipedia | Current month/day | "On This Date" events |
| QuoteSlate | Tag preferences | Random quotes |
| Unsplash | Search terms | Background images |
| RSS Feeds | Standard HTTP GET to feed URL | Article fetching |
| Subreddit name | Feed validation and gallery enrichment | |
| Google Favicons | Domain names | Website icons |
| Ollama (localhost) | Chat messages, model name | Local AI chat (never leaves your device) |
The weather radar tab embeds an iframe from Windy.com. Windy can see your IP address and may set its own cookies.
Bookmark link health checks send a HEAD request to each bookmark URL to verify it's reachable. This must be manually triggered.
When you play a Radio Browser station, a click event is sent to radio-browser.info for their popularity rankings. No user identifier is included.
News and RSS article thumbnails may be fetched from the article page to extract Open Graph images. The article server can see your IP address.
Our website at knewtab.net runs behind nginx. Server logs record only the HTTP method, request path, response status code, and response size. No IP addresses, timestamps, user agents, referrers, or identifying information is logged.
The ksearch search server runs separately and does not log queries, results, or user identifiers.
All settings, notes, todos, conversation history, timers, and widget state are stored in Chrome's chrome.storage.local — stored locally on your device, synced nowhere, and it never leaves your computer. Ollama conversation history is opt-in (off by default) with a configurable retention period.
Required permissions: storage, bookmarks, topSites, activeTab, contextMenus. Optional permissions (history, downloads, tabs, sessions, scripting, notifications, declarativeNetRequest, host access, unlimited storage) are only requested when you enable the related feature. You can revoke them at any time through Chrome's extension settings.
Keith — powderpa@icloud.com