When most people hear “vibe coding,” their minds go straight to creating full-fledged apps, websites, and landing pages using only natural language prompts. And that’s fair enough. This is the most visible version. For a very long time, that was also my perception. I actually started my own ambiance coding journey by creating a simple Chrome extension to solve a personal problem.
Since then, I’ve gotten into vibe-coding. I’ve built countless tools to improve my workflow, prototyped random ideas that lived rent-free in my head, and just saw what I can bring to life with a simple prompt. A few days ago, however, I came across an article on
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It turns out you can vibe-code your new Chrome tab page
The most visited page in your browser is also the most boring
No matter which browser you’re currently using, the new tab page is probably the most visited “page” in your entire browser. By default, it’s a pretty boring page. Typically, you’ll find a search bar, a grid of your most visited sites, and maybe a shortcut or two. Some people tried to make the page much more interesting. For example, I remember using an extension called Momentum to replace the default page with a Pomodoro timer and daily focus prompt! Users also download different themes from the Chrome Web Store to give it a fresh coat of paint. But at the end of the day, you’re still working within the confines of what someone else has built. What if you could just code the whole thing yourself?
This is exactly what Zara Zhang, the creator of LongCut and some of Claude’s skills like Frontend Slides, did. She discovered that all of Chrome’s browsing history is saved locally in a database that an LLM can theoretically analyze. This got her thinking about what she could build with it. It started with an extension that surfaced information from her browsing history, but she quickly realized she’d never use it if she had to click a button to open it every time. She needed an entry point that she was already constantly visiting, which led her to ask Claude if he could turn the new tab page into that entry point. It worked and she discovered that you could completely customize the Chrome new tab page.
I coded my own new tab page in a single prompt
A Pomodoro timer, brain dump and swoosh sound enters a new tab
After digging into this, I found that all you need to do is have two files: a manifest.json file that lets Chrome know that you want to override the new tab page and an HTML file that is your custom new tab page. The HTML bit is what you can encode using the coding agent of your choice! In the manifest.json file you will have something like “chrome_url_overrides”: { “newtab”: “newtab.html” }, and whatever you put in that HTML file is what appears every time you open a new tab. That’s it! All you need to do on your end is drop both files into a folder, load it as an unzipped extension in chrome://extensions with developer mode enabled, and you’re done. The best part is that you don’t necessarily need access to premium coding-focused tools like Claude Code and Codex. I used the web version of Claude (not Claude Code) to generate the entire HTML file in a single prompt.
I told him about my workflow and how I wanted a Pomodoro timer, a place to dump story ideas, a to-do list, reminders, and quick links to the tools I actually use every day. In a matter of seconds, it gave me HTML, CSS and JavaScript files with the new custom tab page. He asked me to drop the files into a folder with a manifest.json and then load it as an unzipped extension, but I decided to take it a step further and asked Claude to just bundle the manifest file and zip it all up for me. He then handed me a ready-to-install extension package, and all I had to do on my end was unzip it and load it into Chrome.
I gave Claude Code control of my office for a week, and he automated things I didn’t think possible
I was seriously stunned.
The result was also very impressive. There was a Pomodoro focus timer on the left of the page with the typical three options: Focus, Break, and Long Break. Next to it is a Today’s Tasks panel where I can drop tasks and check them off as I go. On the right side, there’s a Post Ideas section where I can dump my ideas and save them as little bullet points, as well as a Reminders section for anything I don’t want to forget. It even added a quick links grid with shortcuts to the tools I use every day for my work like Asana, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, Drive and Claude! Finally, he also added a random motivational quote at the bottom that changes every time I open a new tab (and the quotes are ironically personalized based on my workflow, like “stop researching, start writing”).
Zara created a tab manager for its new tab page
Its new tab page had a different problem to solve
What I’ve illustrated above is extremely specific to my workflow and is something only I would find useful. That’s the whole point here! Your new tab page is your new tab page and should be customized to suit the way you work. Zara, for example, had a completely different problem she wanted to solve. She realized that she found herself with way too many tabs open and needed a way to manage the chaos. So she created something called Tab Out and open-sourced the code on this GitHub repository.
The Chrome extension replaces your new tab page with a dashboard of everything you currently have open, all grouped by domain. There is a separate homepage group that brings together everyday-use websites like Gmail, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and GitHub. The extension also has duplicate detection flags that activate when the same page is opened twice and allows you to clean them with just one click.
You can even quickly save tabs for later and close them from your new tab page without having to search for them in your tab bar. And because Zara wanted the experience to be satisfying, closing any tab triggers a swoosh sound and confetti effect. She describes it as the Marie Kondo method for browser tabs!
This should be your next vibe-coding project
I’ve been obsessed with mood coding tools that improve my workflow, but I never thought the simplest, most impactful one was hiding in the most obvious place: my new tab page.