Your new tab page opens fifty times a day. Make it do something
4 min read · How-to
A work new tab page should load instantly, show the links you chose rather than the sites an algorithm guessed, and let you search them from the keyboard. Browsers ship a search box plus most-visited thumbnails, which drift toward whatever you opened last week. Linksley's extension replaces the new tab with your boards, rendered from a local cache so it appears with no spinner, searchable, and - for companies - carrying the required boards an admin pushes to everyone.
The most-visited page nobody designed
Count your new tabs for one morning. Every Cmd+T, every window, every time you finished something and needed the next thing. It is easily fifty on a normal day, and it is the same page every time: a search box and eight thumbnails, half of them a site you visited twice in March and one of them a page you would rather not explain.
That surface is prime real estate that came pre-filled with a guess. The default new tab optimizes for a stranger's average behavior. Your day starts from about twelve specific places - the CRM, the ticket queue, the two dashboards, the shared drive folder, the doc that runs the week - and none of them are guaranteed to be on those tiles.
What a good work new tab actually needs
Most new tab extensions fail on the first item and it is the one that decides whether you keep them.
- Instant. If the page fetches from a server before it paints, you will feel it fifty times a day and you will uninstall it. It must render from local cache first.
- Your links, not suggestions. Chosen and grouped by you, in an order that reflects the work, not a frequency counter.
- Search from the keyboard. Cmd+T, type three letters, Enter. Anything slower than that and you will go back to typing URLs.
- Structure that holds more than a screenful - categories, not one flat wall of tiles.
- For teams: the links the company needs you to have, present on day one, without an onboarding call.
- Quiet. No news feed, no weather widget, no wallpaper carousel. You are passing through.
Setting one up in Linksley
Install the extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Opera, sign in, and turn on the new tab option. Your boards become the new tab: board, then categories, then links, with search across everything you have access to. It renders from a local cache, so it is on screen before you finish the keystroke, and it stays usable if the network is having a bad minute.
For a company this is the cheapest onboarding that exists. An admin marks a board as required and it appears on every member's new tab and cannot be removed by them - the tools list, the handbook, the ticket queue, the client folder. Roles that only need to read get view-only access, enforced in the app and in the extension. On Business, white-label puts your logo on the app, the extension, and the new tab, so what a new hire sees on day one looks like your company rather than ours.
A new tab that shows your links is not a prettier browser; it is the difference between remembering where things live and seeing where things live.
When the empty new tab wins
If your work starts in an editor, a terminal, or one app you never leave, the new tab is not your entry point and dressing it up is a distraction. Plenty of people are happiest with a blank page and a fast keyboard - a minimal extension that renders nothing at all is a perfectly good answer, and no bookmark manager will beat muscle memory for six URLs you type in your sleep.
This page is for the other kind of day: the one that runs on forty links across five clients, where the cost is not typing but remembering which of the four dashboards has the number you need. Also worth knowing up front - the board experience is desktop-first, and there is no Safari extension, so a Safari-only shop gets nothing out of the new tab feature.
Common questions
Can I replace the Chrome new tab page with my own links?
Yes. A new tab extension can take over the page - Linksley's extension renders your boards there, searchable, from a local cache so it loads instantly. It works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera; Safari does not allow it.
Why is my new tab page slow?
Most custom new tab extensions fetch content from a server before they paint, so you watch a blank page or a spinner on every tab. Pick one that renders from a local cache and syncs in the background.
Can a company control what appears on employees' new tab?
In Linksley, an admin can mark a board as required. It lands on every member's new tab and members cannot remove it, which is how new hires get the tools list without an onboarding call.
Does a custom new tab page track what I browse?
It depends on the extension - read the permissions before installing. Linksley shows the links you saved to your own boards and serves no ads on any plan.
Put your tools on every new tab
Install the extension, sign in, and your boards open with the browser - free on one board.
Start free