A new tab page with no tracking and no account

The most viewed page in your browser

Count the tabs you open in a working day. Thirty, fifty, sometimes more. Each time, the same page appears for a second while you type an address or click a shortcut. It looks like nothing. It is, in fact, the best observation post in the whole browser.

An extension that replaces this page does not merely draw a background and some icons. It runs every time you open a tab, it knows when that happens, and it sees what you click next. Add the shortcuts you have stored there and you get a fairly accurate picture of your digital life.

What a curious extension could learn

None of this requires clever engineering. It is simply the information that flows through a new tab page:

• The sites that matter to you. Shortcuts on a home page are not a random sample. They are your work tools, your bank, your mail, your subscriptions, sometimes an employer or a client.
• Your working hours. The time of your first tab in the morning, the last one at night, the days you do not work at all. The rhythm of tab opening describes a schedule with uncomfortable precision.
• What you search for. If the page has a search field, everything typed into it can be read before it ever reaches a search engine, including the words you delete.
• Your bookmarks. An extension allowed to read them receives your interests in one pass, often going back years.
• Roughly where you are. An IP address is enough to place a city. A weather widget that calls the developer’s own server can add the exact city you typed in.

Taken one at a time, these crumbs look harmless. Collected and tied to a stable identifier, they become a profile, and profiles are sold. It is a well known business model: the extension is free, pleasant to use, and the data pays for the rest. Nothing forces a developer to work that way. The difficulty is telling the difference before you install.

How to read an extension listing on the Chrome Web Store

The store gives you enough to judge, as long as you know where to look. Three minutes is plenty.

The privacy section

Every listing carries a panel describing what the developer declares it collects: personally identifiable information, web history, website content, location. Developers fill this in themselves, but they are accountable for it, and a false declaration is grounds for removal. An extension that ticks “web history” and “location” in order to show a grid of icons has already answered your question.

Look as well for the statement that data is neither sold nor used for purposes unrelated to the extension’s core function. Its absence is never a harmless oversight.

The permissions it asks for

When you install, Chrome lists the access being requested. Two phrases deserve a pause.

“Read and change all your data on all websites” is the broadest permission there is. It makes sense for an ad blocker or a password manager. It does not make sense for a home page, which only needs to act on its own page.

“Read your browsing history” deserves the same question. Does the extension offer a feature that genuinely depends on it, or is it asking once, at install time, for convenience?

Optional permissions

This is the most useful part and the least known. Chrome lets a developer declare a permission as optional. It is requested only when the feature is actually used, and you can decline without losing anything else.

A carefully built extension makes optional everything that is not needed on first launch. An extension that demands everything up front is asking you to trust it for a feature you may never use.

What Hoome does

Hoome is a new tab page built around that constraint from the start, rather than patched with it afterwards.

• Everything stays in your browser. Shortcuts, folders, notes, tasks, settings, background image: all of it is written to Chrome’s local storage, and none of it is sent anywhere, not even with a Premium account.
• No account for the free version. No sign up, no email address, no login: you install it and you use it. Premium asks for one, through Google, which knows nothing but your address and your subscription.
• No analytics. No usage measurement, no install identifier, no crash reports sent anywhere. We do not know how many shortcuts you have created, or which ones.
• Bookmarks only on request. Importing browser bookmarks is offered when you open the import dialog, never at install time. Chrome asks for your permission at that moment, you tick the folders you want, they are read once and never modified.
• A strict privacy mode. One checkbox in the settings stops every network request, with no exception. The page falls back to coloured initials instead of site icons, and the weather widget goes silent.

The only requests Hoome makes, stated plainly

A page claiming it never asks anything of anyone would be lying. Here are the network calls Hoome makes by default, and what they carry.

Site icons. To show a shortcut’s logo, the extension asks Google’s and DuckDuckGo’s public icon services for that domain’s icon. What leaves your machine is the domain name and nothing else: no full address, no page content, no identifier. The icon is then cached locally, so the request is not repeated on every tab. You can also replace any icon with an image of your own or with coloured initials, and ask for nothing at all.

Weather, if you turn it on. The widget is off by default. Once enabled, it queries Open-Meteo, an open service that requires neither an account nor a key, using the coordinates of the city you picked. When you search for that city in the settings, the text you type goes to the same service to find its coordinates. Nothing else travels.

The account, if you take Premium. It is created through Google, from the extension settings or on hoome.dev. The extension then talks to our server to sign you in and read your plan back, and to nothing else: no shortcut, folder or note is sent. Without an account, this exchange does not exist.

If those requests still bother you, strict privacy mode removes them all. It is a checkbox, not a paid tier.

Your data is yours, including on the way out

Keeping everything local has a flip side: what exists in only one place can be lost. Hoome takes that seriously.

Ten automatic snapshots are kept at all times and rotate as you work. If an import goes wrong, or a slip deletes a folder, you can step back.

Export produces a readable JSON file containing everything: shortcuts, folders, settings, notes, tasks. Keep it wherever you like, import it on another computer, or hold on to it for the day you decide to switch to something else. Nothing is held hostage, because nothing is on our side to hold.

Going further

The full legal detail, service by service, is in the privacy policy. If you need to justify Hoome to an IT department or a data protection officer, the page written for organisations gathers the documents usually asked for.

And if what you really want is to take back control of this page, the frequently asked questions cover the built in options of Chrome before you install anything at all.