SimpTab and the case for a new tab page that does almost nothing

A new tab page that is mostly an image

SimpTab, which the project describes as a minimal Chrome new tab extension, has a stated aim: to make you feel good every time you open it, by removing extra functionality and focusing only on how the tab page looks.

That framing explains the whole feature set. The core is background images, and there are several ways to get them. A daily background changes once per day and comes only from Bing.com. A random background picks from the sources you tick in the control bar. A third mode shows the current background and never changes it.

Around that sit layout options: top-left alignment, centre alignment, and a framed effect. There is a loading indicator for the background that appears in the lower left only while the image loads, and the page supports keyboard shortcuts and a multi-function input box.

There is also a set of power features that the project marks with version badges, which is a way of showing when something was added. They include a zen mode, a history view of past backgrounds, white noise, sending the current background to a phone, a bookmarks bar, a favourites and subscriptions manager, and an options page with settings for custom sources, custom search, custom sites and custom styles.

The overall shape is a photo viewer with a browser's worth of attachments. Whether that is minimal depends on which of those you switch on.

Where the backgrounds come from, including a satellite view of Earth

The background source list is the interesting engineering decision in the extension, and it is a list of third-party sites rather than bundled images.

The sources named are bing.com, wallhaven.cc, unsplash.com, googleartproject.com, desktoppr.co and visualhunt.com. On top of that sits a curated collection, described as a SimpTab selection with one issue per week and between one and nine hand-collected wallpapers per issue, following the approach of iOS apps. Past issues are said to be announced through a Weibo account. There is also a favourites collection, which is the set of backgrounds you have saved through the control bar, and an explore view built from curated Unsplash collections.

The standout source is the Earth. Thanks to the Himawari-8 satellite, the new tab page can show a photograph of the Earth taken from orbit, and it is marked as arriving in version 1.5.4.

This design has an obvious consequence. The extension is a client for images hosted elsewhere, so a background that fails to load is usually a source that changed, blocked the request, or stopped serving the URL, and not a bug in the extension itself. It also means the extension ships almost no image data of its own, which keeps the package small but puts the reliability of the page in the hands of services the project does not control.

Install paths: the Web Store build or an offline CRX

There are two ways to get SimpTab, and the difference between them is significant in practice.

The primary route is the Chrome Web Store listing, and the project asks for a review vote there if you find it useful. The second route is an offline download of a CRX package for a specific version, linked directly from the project site.

The version numbering shows how the two diverge. The newest tagged release is 1.5.5, tagged as the official 1.5.5, dated 2019-11-29. Before that came 1.5.4.330 in March 2019 and 1.5.4.0202 in February 2019. The offline download link in the README points at the 1.5.5 package specifically.

So the CRX route is pinned to 2019, and the Web Store build may be the same build, since the project does not publish anything newer. That is worth knowing before you pick a source, because a side-loaded CRX does not receive the automatic updates the Store build gets, and Chrome treats a manually installed extension differently from a Store one.

There is also a help centre and a discussion group linked from the README, and the project accepts background submissions through a form, with a backup address listed.

For anyone wanting to build from source, the repository is a Grunt and RequireJS project with a webpack dev server. The package.json scripts are grunt publish for the deploy step and webpack-dev-server with hot reload for development, and the dev dependencies are the standard Grunt plugins for watching, linting with JSHint, cleaning, copying, RequireJS and HTML minification, all pinned to wildcard versions. The engines field asks for Node 0.10.0 or later.

Localisation, structure and the limits of the repository

SimpTab detects the interface language automatically, supporting simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English, with separate readme files for traditional Chinese and English. The _locales directory at the repository root is where those strings live for a Chrome extension, and the manifest.json and main.html are the extension entry point, with js, assets and a vender directory holding the code and resources.

The licence is stated as MIT in the package.json, and the README links to the MIT licence text, although the repository listing shows no recognised licence. The project presents itself as free and open source, and asks for votes on the Web Store rather than payment, though a donation link is included.

The maintenance picture needs to be read carefully, because two different dates are in play. The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-10-09, so commits are still landing in the source. The newest tagged release, however, is 1.5.5 from 2019-11-29. A repository that receives commits without shipping a new tagged build means the public install and the source tree can differ, and there is no release cadence documented to tell you when they will converge.

For a new tab page, that gap matters less than it would for a library, because the extension is small and its behaviour is visible the moment you open a tab. For anyone who wants to contribute, the presence of a Grunt publish script and a documentation site with a changelog suggests the release process exists even if it is not running often.

What a photo-first new tab gives up

It is worth being explicit about the trade, because a new tab page is a product decision more than a technical one.

Most new tab pages are dashboards: search boxes, shortcuts, news feeds, widgets. SimpTab inverts that. Its stated purpose is the appearance of the tab page, and the common sites feature is deliberately limited to three modes, simple, advanced and hidden, plus a custom option, rather than being a full launcher.

If your habit is to open a new tab and immediately type a search query, this extension works against you, because the search entry point is a secondary element rather than the centre of the page. If your habit is to open a new tab to look at something calm before starting work, the same design is exactly what you want, and the zen mode and white noise features are there for that case.

A second limitation is the dependency on external services. A Bing daily background, an Unsplash explore collection and a satellite image are all fetches to third parties, and the project provides no offline fallback for them. On a locked-down corporate network or an offline laptop, the page will show its background area empty.

The third limitation is the one already noted. There is no new tagged release since 2019, so the extension you install is effectively a fixed artefact that will not gain features, and you should decide whether you are comfortable with that.

Editorial conclusion

SimpTab is a good fit for someone who wants their new tab page to be a single photograph rather than a dashboard, since the extension deliberately strips the page back and adds nothing to it, and the source is small enough to read in an afternoon. It is a poor fit for a team that needs a maintained extension with a support commitment, because the newest tagged release is 1.5.5 from 2019-11-29 even though the repository itself was pushed to on 2026-10-09. Before installing, decide whether you are using the Chrome Web Store build or the offline CRX, since they can be years apart, and check whether the background sources you want still respond, because several of them are third-party sites the extension only links to.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. Kenshin/simptab on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases