Setting your new tab page on Chrome

In general, setting your new tab page to a custom HTML file has become a bit bothersome. There are extensions out there for both Firefox and Chrome that fulfil some requirements and I do still recommend that people who are not comfortable editing files directly stick to those.

New tab override is the best one you can find but the core limitation is that it can only access a single file so you cannot use startpages that rely on other local files (scripts, stylesheets).

The manifest.json way

The simplest way to go about setting your new tab page is creating a manifest.json file inside the folder your startpage is in.

Locate your startpage folder (where the index.html file is) and create a new file called manifest.json.

Inside this file, we will save the following lines:

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "name": "New tab Startpage",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Custom new tab startpage.",
  "chrome_url_overrides": {
    "newtab": "index.html"
  }
}

The only thing to change here is the "newtab": "index.html" line, if your HTML file is called something else, change this to match it.

With the file saved, navigate to chrome://extensions/ in your Chrome browser.

Toggle Developer mode in the top right.

This should make three more buttons appear on the left side of your screen.

Click Load unpacked and select the folder in which your startpage (and the new manifest.json file) is.

Your folder will appear as an extension, you can now toggle developer mode off and open a new tab.

Autofocus

Stealing focus from Chrome's address bar is hard and the documentation essentially states that it should be impossible.

There are methods out there but I currently cannot find one that is reliable enough to share.

Don't have a startpage? Check out our guides for some simple startpages you can make in a jiffy!