FoxHome

FoxHome replaces Firefox's new tab page (and optionally the home page) with a clean, self-contained start page.

What you get

• Clock and date — unobtrusive, can be turned off.
• Search — Google, Bing, Baidu, or DuckDuckGo. You can also add, edit or remove engines yourself: give one a name and any search URL containing %s, and it shows up in the picker. Switching engines is one click and it remembers. Typing a URL (like github.com) opens it directly instead of searching.
• Quick links — add, rename, delete and drag to reorder. FoxHome also takes the sites you visit most often and appends them as extra shortcuts (marked with a "history" badge). Those auto-added ones are never written into your saved links — flip the switch off and they disappear.
• Recent visits — your actual browsing history as compact cards: title, domain, relative time, visit count. Deduplicate by site, filter by keyword, or turn the whole section off.
• Custom background — six built-in gradients, or drop in your own image (it is compressed and stored locally), with an adjustable dimming layer.
• Keyboard first — / or Ctrl+K jumps straight to the search box.

Nowhere. Everything FoxHome stores — links, background, settings — lives in your own browser's local storage. The extension reads your browsing history through Firefox's history API, renders it locally, and never transmits it.

The one exception is off by default and clearly labelled in the settings: if you turn on "use website screenshots", the URLs of the cards on screen are sent to a third-party screenshot service (s0.wp.com) to fetch thumbnails.

Permissions, and why

• history — powers the "recent visits" cards and the auto-filled quick links. Nothing else needs a permission: the search-engine editor is plain local data.
• New tab override — the whole point of the extension.
• Home page override — also optional in effect: change your home page in about:preferences#home at any time and FoxHome will stop overriding it.