Fancy more customizability and a splash of colour to your new tab page? Then read below as we take a look at the ‘Awesome New Tab Page’ extension for Google Chrome!
By default, Chrome offers a fairly functional new tab page that gives you access to all your web apps and most visited websites, with options to view recently closed tabs as well as those open on other devices like your cellphone or tablet. But what if you wanted a more beautiful and dynamic page full of customizable tools and widgets?
Meet ‘Awesome New Tab Page’
‘Awesome New Tab Page’ is an extension which gives your new tab page a fresh new look with increased customizability and plenty of features to boot, looking at this perspective trying out this extension is a no-brainer.
On first glance you can see that it has took some inspiration from Windows 8 looking at the tiles against a flat background, but the developers have given it their own take.
Enhance your New Tab Page with ultimate customizability and power. Awesome, like you.” – ANTP
When you first install the extension, you are greeted with several stock apps and widgets which will populate the grid-based layout on the page. A couple of the stock apps take you to popular internet destinations like Google and Amazon. I have found that the notepad widget can be quite useful for jotting down reminders and useful websites to browse later.
On the left side of the page are several buttons which when clicked will give you a plethora of options and settings for you to tweak, as well as a link that will take you to the Chrome Web Store, but showing only apps and widgets that are compatible with Awesome New Tab Page. I really like that idea actually, being able to install from a fairly decent selection of apps and widgets allows you to fine-tune the extension to your liking, and you can always move the tiles around at your will, to keep things fresh.
Summary
I feel that Awesome New Tab Page is a great new tab replacement when tweaked to your liking, but I found that the user interface felt quite clunky and in some ways not the most user friendly (see settings), although the new user tutorial widget that appears on the page when you first install does help.
There is noticeable slowdown when opening a new tab, and because of this I feel that the extension doesn’t load quick enough for me to justify using it when I could quickly use the omnibox to get to what I want; However, Awesome New Tab Page is updated frequently so we can (hopefully) expect that these relatively minor slowdown issues will be fixed in the near future. With that said, it has a lot of potential to become a killer app.
Got an extension suggestion for us to review? Then feel free to give your recommendations in the comments!