Top 10 Best New Tab Extensions for Chrome in 2025

Momentum aims to turn your new tab page into a source of calm, focus, and inspiration. It replaces the standard page with a visually stunning photograph that changes daily, accompanied by an inspirational quote and a personal mantra. This focus on aesthetics and mindfulness is a core part of its appeal, designed to provide a moment of peace before you dive into your online activities.

Beyond the visuals, Momentum offers practical tools directly on the dashboard. A simple to-do list helps you keep track of daily tasks, while a 'Focus Mode' dims the background and highlights your main goal for the day, encouraging concentration. You can also add shortcuts to your most visited websites and check the local weather at a glance.

Momentum operates on a freemium model. While the core features provide a significant upgrade to the default new tab, many advanced functionalities like unlimited Focus Mode, task manager integrations (Todoist, Asana, etc.), Soundscapes, Metrics for habit tracking, and AI features require a Momentum Plus subscription. This is a common point of feedback among users – the free version is beautiful but somewhat limited in productivity features compared to the paid tier.

Dashy positions itself as an all-in-one productivity hub, transforming your new tab into a highly customizable dashboard filled with widgets and integrations. It also features a side panel, allowing access to your dashboard elements while browsing other sites.

The core strength of Dashy lies in its extensive widget library and integration capabilities. You can embed widgets for Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook Calendar, Todoist, Spotify, notes, news feeds, podcasts, and even phone-sized views of social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. This allows users to consolidate many frequently used tools and information sources into a single, accessible view.

Dashy offers customization options including multiple profiles (e.g., for work and personal use), background choices (including uploads), and layout adjustments. The real-time syncing ensures your dashboard remains consistent across devices. However, it's crucial to note that Dashy follows a freemium model where the free version is extremely limited. Most useful widgets and advanced features require a paid subscription, a point frequently highlighted in user reviews.

Homey aims to create a cozy, inspiring, and productive workspace on your new tab page. It stands out with its emphasis on live wallpapers, offering a variety of animated themes like nature, travel, and space to personalize the visual experience. This dynamic background feature adds a layer of engagement beyond static images.

Functionally, Homey provides a robust set of tools. It features a powerful bookmark manager that allows for visual organization with folders and custom icons, making frequently visited sites easily accessible. Productivity widgets include real-time weather updates, a personal notes section, and inspirational quotes. Recently, Homey integrated ChatGPT, providing quick access to the AI chatbot directly from the start page.

The extension is designed to be lightweight and fast, ensuring it doesn't hinder browser performance. It also includes a sidebar for quick access to browser history and downloads. Homey offers a good balance of aesthetic customization and practical productivity features, making it a strong all-around choice for users looking to enhance their new tab page.

Tabliss focuses on providing a beautiful, customizable, and privacy-respecting new tab experience. It positions itself as a free alternative to extensions like Momentum, emphasizing that it requires no permissions and does not track user data.

The core appeal of Tabliss is its extensive background options and widget customization, combined with its commitment to privacy. Users can choose backgrounds from Unsplash (photos), GIPHY (animated GIFs), solid colors, gradients, or even upload their own images. The visual experience is central, aiming to make each new tab aesthetically pleasing.

Tabliss offers a variety of useful widgets, including different clock styles (analog, digital, literature quotes), personal greetings, real-time weather, daily quotes, a to-do list, quick notes, speed dial links, a search box (supporting multiple engines), work hour countdowns, and even niche widgets like live NBA scores or a GitHub contribution calendar. All these can be arranged and customized to create a personalized dashboard. Its combination of beauty, utility, and privacy focus makes it a compelling choice.

AI New Tab offers a minimalist yet feature-rich new tab experience, integrating productivity tools and AI assistance seamlessly. Its design philosophy focuses on providing essential information and tools without clutter, accessible through both the main new tab page and a persistent sidebar.

A key highlight is its integration with task and calendar management systems, supporting Google Tasks, Todoist, TickTick, Microsoft To-Do, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. This allows users to view and manage their schedules and tasks directly within the browser environment. The inclusion of ChatGPT, accessible via the sidebar, provides AI assistance for research, writing, translation, and summarization across any webpage.

Beyond integrations, the extension offers enhanced bookmark management, Gmail notifications, an RSS news reader, a cloud-synced notepad (compatible with Google Keep), a Pomodoro timer, weather forecasts, and even mindfulness exercises. Customization is extensive, allowing users to change themes, colors, fonts, and backgrounds (including live wallpapers). Its blend of deep integrations, AI features, and customization makes it a powerful productivity tool.

CaretTab champions user control with its motto: "Your Tab, Your Rules!". It provides a highly customizable dashboard experience for the new tab page, focusing on a wide variety of widgets and a privacy-first approach that requires no sign-ups or tracking for standard use.

The standout feature of CaretTab is the sheer flexibility and range of its widgets. Users can add and arrange multiple clock types (digital, analog, binary), detailed date displays, weather updates, to-do lists, notepads, quote displays, quick link launchers, countdown timers, embeddable iFrames (for displaying parts of other websites), and even fun extras like a fidget toy or the classic Snake game. Each widget can be tailored in terms of font, color, size, and exact position on the page, allowing for intricate dashboard designs.

CaretTab also includes a sidebar housing additional tools like a calculator, unit converter, timer/stopwatch, password generator, and an AI chat powered by OpenAI. With its focus on granular customization and a broad toolkit, CaretTab appeals to users who want precise control over their new tab environment without compromising privacy.

Material You NewTab brings Google's modern "Material You" design language to your Chrome new tab page. It aims for a clean, stylish look that integrates visually with the Material You aesthetic found in recent Android versions and Google apps, appealing to users who value design consistency.

The extension offers a clean interface featuring the current time (analog or digital options), date, and real-time weather information (city, temperature, humidity). A central search bar allows users to type a query and then select their preferred search engine (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, YouTube, etc.) before executing the search, offering flexibility.

Customization options include adjusting the color theme, adding personalized text to the page, switching clock styles, and adding favorite website shortcuts for quick access. It also supports multiple languages. While not as feature-packed with widgets as some other dashboard extensions, its primary draw is its specific design inspiration and clean presentation, making it a popular choice for users seeking a modern, Google-inspired look.

Speed Dial 2 is a long-standing and popular extension focused on providing a highly organized and customizable visual bookmarking system (speed dial) for your new tab page. It allows users to save and arrange links to their favorite websites as visual tiles.

The core functionality revolves around creating and organizing these speed dial tiles. Users can save an unlimited number of sites, customize their appearance (including using website screenshots or custom images as thumbnails), and organize them into groups for better management (e.g., 'Work', 'News', 'Social'). This makes accessing frequently visited pages quick and visual.

Beyond the speed dials, the extension provides easy access to standard browser bookmarks and recently closed tabs. It offers various themes, dark/light mode support, and customization options for the layout and appearance of the dials. Collaboration features allow sharing groups of bookmarks, and synchronization keeps dials consistent across different computers (requires account/potentially paid). While historically very popular, potential users should note that some recent reviews mention issues with updates or a push towards paid features.

MONKNOW New Tab offers a sleek and modern personal dashboard experience, focusing heavily on customizable speed dial icons and efficient organization. It aims to be the 'new tab you are dreaming of' by combining aesthetics with practical features.

The extension allows users to create groups for their speed dial icons, enabling effective sorting of websites based on categories or needs. Adding new icons is designed to be intuitive, with automatic fetching of official site icons where possible. Customization is a strong point: users can upload their own images (JPG, PNG, SVG, even GIF) for icons and wallpapers, and adjust the layout settings like icon size, spacing, and opacity. Official libraries provide thousands of alternative icons and HD wallpapers.

MONKNOW supports data synchronization via a user account, keeping configurations consistent across devices. It also features light and dark theme modes and includes a basic ToDo list function. Its focus on highly customizable visual bookmarks within a clean interface makes it appealing for users who prioritize personalized site access.

Humble New Tab Page offers a clean, fast, and highly customizable new tab experience centered around your browser's built-in data: bookmarks, most visited sites, and recently closed tabs. It avoids external widgets or complex dashboards in favor of a streamlined presentation of essential browser elements.

The extension replaces the default new tab with a layout you can tailor. You can arrange folders (representing bookmark folders, most visited sites, etc.) into columns, reordering them via drag-and-drop. Extensive customization options allow users to change fonts, colors, spacing, background images (including local files), and more, enabling a personalized yet simple look.

Key strengths include its lightweight nature, fast loading times, and focus on privacy by primarily using local browser data. It's also open-source (MIT license), appealing to users who value transparency. For those who want quick, customizable access to their core browsing data without unnecessary frills, Humble New Tab Page provides an excellent, efficient solution.