Mue, an open source new tab page with widgets and a marketplace

What the extension does and how it is distributed

Mue is a fast, open and free-to-use browser extension that gives a new, fresh and customisable tab page to modern browsers. The project site is muetab.com and there is a fully featured in-browser demo at demo.muetab.com.

The distribution is broad for a new tab extension. It is on the Chrome Web Store, on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons site, on Firefox Add-ons, and on the Whale store from Naver. For anything else you can sideload it manually using the files from the GitHub releases, which is the route that matters for a Chromium fork or an unusual browser.

The reason to list the stores is that a new tab extension is a privileged position. It replaces a page the user sees dozens of times a day, and in some browsers it can be granted the ability to see every tab's URL, which is what makes a new tab extension a privacy question rather than a cosmetic one. The README answers that directly in the list of reasons to use it: it does not track your browsing activity, and the project is open source under the BSD-3 licence.

That claim is checkable rather than a matter of trust, because the extension is open and the permission list is visible in the store listing. It is worth checking it yourself on install, because an extension that quietly requests history access contradicts the stated position.

The other reasons to use it are about the surface itself. A beautiful and minimalist design, a customisable layout, and widgets such as weather, notes and bookmarks. The extensibility point is the Mue Marketplace, which lets you add further widgets.

The repository is a JavaScript project using React, and the topics list the browser targets along with the extension manifests. The releases show a 7.6 line with beta tags published ahead of the stable ones, with v7.6.1 in April 2026 and v7.6.1-beta in January.

The privacy position and why it is checkable

The privacy claim deserves more than a nod, because the category makes it a live issue.

A new tab extension can, in most browsers, be granted permission to read the URL of every page you visit. That permission is what lets a new tab show a reading list, a bookmark of the current site, or a search box that knows what you were last looking at. It is also exactly the capability that a data collector would want.

The README's position is that Mue does not track your browsing activity and that the project is open source under the BSD-3 licence, which means you can read the code that makes the request rather than taking the claim on trust. For a piece of software whose entire job is to be the page you look at all day, that distinction between a claim and an inspectable implementation is the substantive part of the pitch.

The widgets are where the permission question becomes concrete. A weather widget needs your location, a notes widget needs storage, and a bookmark widget needs nothing beyond what you give it. A new tab extension with a marketplace can therefore accumulate a broad permission set one useful widget at a time, which is a structural argument for checking the permission list rather than trusting the aggregate description.

The design of the extension is also relevant. A new tab page that runs a heavy web application in the background costs memory and CPU on every new tab, and browsers have started throttling background tabs. A fast, open and free-to-use extension is partly a claim about that overhead, and a minimalist design is partly a performance decision rather than only an aesthetic one.

The other feature worth naming is the startpage integration in the topic list, which is a search box on the new tab that points somewhere you choose rather than at a default engine you did not.

The development workflow and the release branches

The development section is short and tells you the toolchain: bun, with a small set of scripts.

The scripts are named plainly. bun install to get the dependencies, bun run dev with an optional host to start a development server, bun run build for a production copy, bun run lint with an optional fix flag, bun run pretty to run prettier, and two translation scripts.

Those last two are worth a note. bun run translations migrates the old translation format to the new one, and bun run translations:percentages updates the completion percentages from Weblate. Having a dedicated script for a format migration tells you the translation format changed at some point and that the migration is a one-off for people pulling down an old branch.

The contribution guidance points at CONTRIBUTING.md, and the README lists what it covers: the development workflow, the branch strategy, the commit message format and the pull request process. The branch strategy is given in the README itself as dev, then beta, then main.

That three-stage flow is a reasonable model for a browser extension, and the reason is the review process. Extensions on the Chrome Web Store and on Edge go through a review, and a beta channel lets a maintainer ship a build to the store, let it sit through review, and only then promote it to stable for everyone. The beta tags in the release history match that.

The Weblate integration is the other structural fact. Localisation is handled through Weblate rather than through pull requests editing translation files, and the percentages script pulls the completion figures back into the repository so the README can show them. That is a common arrangement and it means the translation workflow is a hosted service rather than a Git workflow, which is worth knowing if you are contributing a translation yourself.

The project also takes part in Hacktoberfest, which the topic list records, and that is a reasonable way to describe the shape of the contribution base for a project of this kind.

The marketplace and where this fits

The Mue Marketplace is the extension point that turns Mue from a new tab page into a platform, and it is the part of the design that most affects whether the project stays interesting over time.

A new tab page is a crowded category. The built-in browser new tab pages offer a background image, a search box and a handful of shortcuts, and the third-party versions add anything from a clock to a to-do list to a dashboard. What distinguishes Mue is that the widget layer is open to third parties through the marketplace, so the useful extensions of the year are written by people who needed them rather than by the maintainers.

The difference in approach from the built-in alternatives is that this is a self-hosted-feeling product. You install an extension, you configure it, and it renders your own content. There is no account and, on the stated position, no telemetry.

The comparison with the platform alternatives is the one that matters for a recommendation. A product like the Momentum or Tabliss new tab pages, or the dashboard that an operating system or a browser vendor ships, generally come with a curated catalogue and a hosted component. Mue's advantages are the open licence, the absence of a company behind it, and the fact that the whole thing is inspectable. Its disadvantages are a smaller widget catalogue, no first-party support when something breaks, and the usual reality of an extension maintained by one or two people on evenings.

The Widgets list gives the scope. Weather, notes and bookmarks are the named ones, and the marketplace covers the rest. A widget that shows your notes is the kind of thing a new tab page is uniquely good at, because it is the one page you open every morning, and having the note there rather than in an app is the whole value.

The honest limitation is that a new tab extension is a privileged extension with a broad threat surface, and the value of an open source one is that you can read it. The permissions are the thing to check on install, and the fact that it is BSD-3 and public means you can.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Mue if you want a new tab page you control, with your own widgets and no tracking, and you are prepared to sideload or accept store review for an extension. Skip it if you want a new tab page with a large catalogue of ready-made widgets, since the marketplace is community driven. Verify first by installing the extension and turning off every permission you do not expect, then checking the widget set in the settings, since the privacy claim is only meaningful if the permission list is small.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: BSD-3-Clause
2. mue/mue on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases