In a Search of a Favorite Start Page (2025)

There’s been a lot going on recently with Google Chrome (and Microsoft Edge) browser extensions.

Things really heated up when new requirements were introduced, dictating how Chrome extensions are built and what they can do – Manifest V3.

Think of Manifest V3 as a blueprint or set of guidelines for extension developers, with a strong focus on boosting security, privacy, and performance.

While the shift to Manifest V3 is a whole other story, the PayPal Honey scandal prompted Google to take a much closer look at how Chrome extensions behave, especially those involved in affiliate marketing.

It’s highly likely that all this commotion has caused extensions like Favorites New Tab from web-accessories.com, which I wrote about back in 2019, to throw up errors and become unavailable for download.

Those who have it installed can keep using it as long as it works, but unfortunately, it’s impossible to install on new computers.

It might just be temporary, until the developer updates their extension to meet the new requirements, or changes whatever caused the extension to be removed.

Manifest V3 has been a hot topic for a long time now, so I suspect if the developer hasn’t done it by now (like many others), it’s possible it won’t happen. Unless the extension was doing something more than it advertised, and Google removed it for security reasons. It’s hard to say.

It’s a shame, because I use this extension daily on my Windows 11 computers in a corporate environment.

“As I’m a big fan of this kind of solution, and on my personal macOS computer I use Safari, which has a fast dial feature built-in for years, I decided to look for an alternative.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it might seem.

The current extensions, to put it politely, are poor. They look like they were made using capabilities from 20 years ago, or they require significant computing power to display everything nicely – unnecessarily!

In my search, I tried various solutions, until I finally came across Favorites Start Page by Jimmy Lye.

Inspired by Safari’s fast dial on macOS (specifically Big Sur), Jimmy Lye created his own kind of clone of the Safari solution some time ago.

In terms of appearance and behaviour, it resembles the current macOS solution, but it’s adapted as an add-on for Chromium-based browsers.

Even though the solution is at version 0.3 beta 1, and the last update was on 20 October 2022, it still works excellently. It integrates with the default bookmarks, and the icons are refreshed from the websites.

Here’s one point that would require some work to make the icons display a bit better, and in the case of sites without proper icons, to have some colour variation, as everything looks very ‘grey’.

I also suspect that this solution isn’t yet adapted to Manifest V3 (I could be wrong), but I hope that if it needs to be, it will be, and we won’t lose it like I lost Favorites New Tab.

As a thank you, I sent an email to the extension’s developer, hoping it reaches them, and that the extension will be updated a bit and serve others for years to come!

For now, I have something that works, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the future.

Or perhaps you know of any recommendable solutions that both look good and work flawlessly?