MaterialYouNewTab: a new tab page styled after Material You

The new tab as a home page

MaterialYouNewTab is a simple new tab, which is the browser's home page, inspired by Google's Material You design. The project describes it as a versatile browser extension that personalises the new tab page with customisable themes, a welcoming message, and various handy tools, all while integrating with your preferred search engine.

That last clause is the design decision. Almost every new tab replacement is a grid of bookmark tiles, and the way this one differs is that the search box is the centre of the page, with the other things arranged around it. The name in the badges is MYNT, Material You New Tab, and the project publishes a live demo at the pages site, which is the fastest way to judge the design before installing anything.

The project is written in JavaScript, licensed under GPL-3.0, and the last push was on 2026-09-13. The releases are v3.3 from 2025-11-23 and v3.2 from 2025-07-21, so the version line moves in step with a fairly leisurely cadence, and there are no patch releases listed beyond the two, which suggests the releases are cut when there is something worth shipping rather than on a schedule.

The repository is a plain static extension rather than a build pipeline project. There is an index.html, a style.css, a favicon directory, a fonts directory, an images directory, an svgs directory, a locales directory, a docs directory, a scripts directory, and a tools directory. The two manifest files at the root, one for Chromium and one named for Firefox, are the visible sign that this is a cross browser extension built from a single codebase.

The feature list, and what each widget costs you

The feature list is long, and it is a list of small independent widgets, which is worth reading that way because each one is a separate decision to enable or ignore.

The search is integrated, using your preferred search engine, with Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave Search, YouTube, and Wikipedia among the named options, and with voice typing built in. The themes are customisable either from a selection or with a built in colour picker. The wallpaper can be your own upload, or daily random images from Lorem Picsum.

There is a personalised greeting, so you can add a custom message or your name and be greeted on every new tab, and a clock that can be a modern analog or digital display. The weather widget shows real time temperature, conditions, humidity, what it feels like, and the maximum and minimum, with support for Celsius and Fahrenheit and for choosing the location.

Then there is the utility layer. Quick shortcuts give you common platforms such as YouTube, email, and WhatsApp, or your own. The AI tools block opens ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, and DeepSeek with one click, which is a fairly definitive statement about what the extension's audience has open in another tab.

The to-do list lets you manage daily tasks, pin the important ones, and it cleans itself up at the start of each day, with pinned tasks reset to pending. The sidebar bookmarks view, delete, and organise bookmarks in either a list or a grid layout, and a Google Apps row launches Gmail, Drive, and Docs.

And the last two features are about the extension itself: a backup and reset facility that saves or restores your setup, or resets everything to default with one click, and language support, so you can use the extension in your preferred language.

One codebase, two manifest files, five browsers

The browser compatibility statement is specific, and the list of browsers tells you how the project handles the split between the two extension models.

It supports all Chromium based browsers, including Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera, and also Firefox based browsers like Firefox and Zen.

That second group is the interesting one, because Firefox does not use the Chromium extension model, and a project that ships to both usually maintains two build variants rather than one. The repository shows exactly that: there is a manifest.json and a manifest(firefox).json, and the parenthesis in the file name is the kind of thing a human writes once and leaves there because the build script needs it.

The distribution channels follow the same split. There are store listings for the Chrome Web Store, for the Microsoft Edge add-ons, and for Mozilla Add-ons, with the badges for the rating and the user count on each, and a separate live demo page that is not an extension at all.

For a user, this means the extension is not tied to one browser vendor, which is a little unusual for a new tab page, where Chrome has a dozen of them and Firefox has a handful. It also means the feature set is the same everywhere, because there is one implementation and the manifests are the only thing that differ.

The topics on the repository reflect the audience too, with the browser specific ones, but also internationalisation, localisation, multilingual, theme, and a weather widget, and a good first issue and hacktoberfest label that says the project intends to receive contributions from newcomers.

Installing from a store, from a release, or from source

There are three routes, and the README organises them by which version you want.

The stable release is v3.3, and it is available from the GitHub releases page, from the Chrome Web Store, from the Microsoft Edge add-ons site, and from Mozilla Add-ons, each with its own button in the README.

The development version is the v3.3 line, and it is installed by cloning the repository or by downloading a zip.

       git clone https://github.com/prem-k-r/MaterialYouNewTab.git

The zip route is described in more detail, because the instructions are aimed at people who have never cloned anything: you can download the latest version as a zip from the archive link, or you can use the Code button on the repository page, looking for the green button labelled Code, clicking it, and choosing Download ZIP in the dropdown.

That level of instruction is a signal about the project's audience. A new tab extension is one of the most common first browser extensions people write, and the installation guide is written for the person who is about to write one.

For someone evaluating the extension, the live demo is the better starting point, because it shows the design, the widgets, and the settings without asking you to install anything and give a new tab page control over your browser.

Localisation, and the repository layout

The locales directory and the two internationalisation topics in the repository metadata point to a project that treats translation as a first class concern rather than an afterthought.

That matters more here than in most extensions. A new tab page is opened dozens of times a day, and the greeting, the clock, the task list, and the settings screen are all text that a user reads many times a day, so the quality of the translation is the quality of the product. The feature list itself makes the point, describing language support as using the extension in your preferred language for better accessibility.

The rest of the layout is what you would expect for a static extension. The index.html and style.css are the page itself. The fonts, images, favicon, and svgs directories are the assets, which is the collection you need for a design that follows a specific visual language, since Material You is not a set of components you can borrow but a particular approach to colour, shape, and elevation. The docs directory holds the documentation, the scripts and tools directories hold the build and maintenance helpers, and the CHANGELOG.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and LICENSE files sit at the top with the README.

Two files are worth pointing out specifically. There is a privacy-policy.html at the root, which is a document rather than a policy page in a settings screen, and it is there because the extension has access to your browsing context and the store listing needs a document to point at. And the CHANGELOG is at the root rather than hidden in a release note, which is the arrangement that makes it useful to someone deciding whether to upgrade.

The licence is GPL-3.0, and that is a deliberate choice for a browser extension, where the code runs on the user's machine and the copyleft obligation is a way of keeping modifications open.

What a new tab extension is allowed to see

It is worth being explicit about the trade, because a new tab override is a privileged position in a browser.

The extension that takes over the new tab page is, in the eyes of the browser, an extension with access to the page it renders. That means the code behind your clock and your weather widget can read the pages you visit, depending on the permissions it requests, and the permission list is what you should look at before you install one, whichever store it came from.

This project takes the open source route rather than the closed extension route, and the licence is GPL-3.0, which means the code that is running on your machine is published and the changes you or anyone else makes to it are published too. For a piece of software that renders the page you see more often than any other, that is a reasonable default.

The feature list also determines what leaves your machine. The weather widget needs your location, the daily wallpaper needs the network, the search box sends your query to whichever engine you pick, and the AI tools buttons send you to those services. None of that is unusual for a new tab page, and the privacy policy document is where the project says what it does with the data it handles.

The practical advice for anyone installing one of these is the same as for any extension with broad permissions: read the permission list, check the privacy policy, and decide whether the widget is worth what it costs. The widgets that are purely local, the clock, the greeting, the task list, and the colour picker, cost nothing but the install. The ones that reach the network, the weather, the wallpaper, the search, and the shortcut links, are the ones worth thinking about.

Editorial conclusion

MaterialYouNewTab fits a user who wants their new tab to carry a search box, a clock, the weather, and a short task list rather than a search engine and a set of shortcuts, and who likes that visual language. It does not fit someone who wants a blank start page or a minimal one, and it does not fit a browser without an extension, such as Safari. Verify first that the store listing you install from is the one you trust, since the extension has access to every page you open if you grant it that permission, that your language is in the supported set, and that the daily wallpaper and weather widgets behave the way you expect on the network your machine is on.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: GPL-3.0
2. prem-k-r/MaterialYouNewTab on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases