Renewed Tab 1.21 released!
1 min read (351 words)This update includes bookmarks and background improvements, faster website icons, and more.
Improved bookmarks: folders and more
This update includes improvements to bookmarks. You can now browse through bookmark folders inside Renewed Tab.
Backgrounds
You can now choose to show a new background image on every page load. Be warned, this can result in a lot of extra network usage. If you navigate away from the new tab page too quickly, it might not be able to load a new photo in time.
You can now search for Unsplash photos using a search term. Any errors in loading the background image are shown on the background settings.
Website icons
Renewed Tab is switching to loading website icons from our servers rather than directly contacting the websites.
The benefits are:
- Icons load faster, as our servers can cache icons between users
- It hides your IP address from each website link you show
- The extension no longer requires permission to access your data on all websites. This is something we have seen quite a few complaints about.
However, this does mean that our servers will see the domain of each website shown. We’ve disabled logging of this on the server.
Opt-in usage statistics
To help understand our userbase and improve Renewed Tab, we will be adding opt-in usage statistics collection to the next update (1.21). This will be designed to collect as little data as possible to achieve our goals. The collection will share information about feature use and retention, and will not contain any widget contents, browser history, or other personal information. The data will be processed in the EU by PostHog and not sold to advertisers.
For more information, see the blog post.
Make sure to check out the updated privacy policy.
What’s next?
Next, we plan to work on fixing the most common complaints. We will make it easier to add custom icons to your bookmarks and links, make it possible to select a folder in the bookmarks widget, and allow uploading multiple background images to the extension.