We build NX1, a start page for the new tab. The obvious question while doing that is what people actually expect from such a page — and for years the obvious answer was: whatever we happened to like. In August we went and looked instead.
Four open-source new tab extensions run their bugs and feature requests publicly on GitHub: Tabliss, Bonjourr, nightTab and MaterialYouNewTab. Together that is 1,444 posts — 1,361 issues and 82 discussions — from 2017 to 2026. We pulled all of them through the GitHub API and counted.
The result made our own product marketing look rather bad. Which is why it is here.
How we counted
Every post was assigned a topic and weighted by its support: comments plus reactions plus upvotes. A request with 300 support was therefore not made three hundred times — it gathered three hundred signals of agreement across several posts. That lifts widely discussed requests above ones mentioned once, which is the more useful ordering for “what do people actually miss” than a plain count.
Topics we looked up were additionally cross-checked with a raw text search, so that the classification could not manufacture the result it was meant to measure. That matters in a moment.
What these people ask for
| Request | Support |
|---|---|
| Folders and groups for links | 306 |
| Your own images as the background | 285 |
| Sync between devices | 252 |
| Search suggestions in the search bar | 213 |
| Custom CSS | 190 |
| Mobile use | 160 |
| Calendar | 155 |
| To-dos | 141 |
The list is remarkably boring, and that is exactly the finding. What sits at the top is not features but order, appearance and reliability: I want to group my links. I want my own image. I want this on both computers. I want to change the font size.
This is a customization audience, not a content audience.
One detail rewards a second look: the calendar is only seventh with 155 support, but at 8.6 support per post it has the highest request intensity in the whole corpus. It is asked for rarely — but when it is, everybody piles in. You only see that if you put both numbers side by side.
What appears exactly zero times in 1,444 posts
Now the part that stung.
Steam, Twitch, Minecraft, Roblox: zero mentions. Not “few” — none. In nine years and 1,444 posts, not one person in these four trackers asked for a gaming integration. We did not take the classifier’s word for it but cross-checked with a raw text search across every title and body, because a result of exactly zero is almost always a measurement error. This time it was not.
For comparison, also small: finance appears in 4 posts, sport in 17.
We marketed NX1 for a long time as “start pages for your topics — Minecraft, Roblox, football”. For the community you reach through r/startpages and these trackers, that is simply off-topic. Not wrong — just completely uninteresting in that particular room.
Why people switch
343 of the posts are complaints rather than requests. Sort them and two patterns remain, and neither is about a missing feature.
First: an update destroys the setup. Titles like “links disappeared after 20.1.1” or “completely broken on FF and Chrome” come up regularly, and the despair in them rarely comes from the bug itself — it comes from the export being broken too, so there is no way back. Someone who spent two years building a wall of tiles loses work they cannot restore.
Second: widgets die with somebody else’s free API. The most-discussed post in the entire corpus is titled “Github Contributions map is broken”, has 69 support and is open to this day. The pattern repeats across all four projects: a widget depends on a free endpoint, the endpoint is switched off, and the widget never comes back — because a volunteer project cannot build a replacement for that.
Both are questions of trust, not of features. And both explain willingness to switch better than any feature list.
What we did about it
NX1 already had the top four: folders, custom images, sync, search suggestions. Three real gaps remained — and we have since closed them:
- Calendar as a widget with ICS subscription, so it works with Google, Outlook and Apple. The highest-intensity request in the corpus, and simply absent from our product before.
- Custom CSS as an advanced feature. It deliberately stays on the device and never travels with a shared area: in NX1 start pages move between people, and someone else’s CSS inside a shared page would be a tool for faking system dialogs.
- Bookmarks bar that can be shown above the tiles.
The second complaint is an architectural decision on our side: our widgets do not talk to third-party endpoints directly but to our own server, which collects and caches the data. When a source dies, that is a problem we can swap out without anything breaking for the user. It is not a promise for eternity — but it is the difference between “we are rebuilding it” and “the widget is gone now”.
What the analysis does not say
Three limitations that matter to us more than the numbers do:
People who file issues are not the average. They are a small, technically confident and unusually opinionated minority. The silent majority who install an extension and never write a word is not represented here at all.
Open-source minimalists are not the market. These four projects attract a particular audience — people who value customization and data thrift over ready-made content. The customers of the large Chrome Web Store extensions may work entirely differently, and this analysis says nothing about them.
Support is not demand. A topic people argue about collects more signals than one everybody agrees on. The ranking measures discussion energy, which correlates with demand but is not the same thing.
It was still the most useful week of our summer — mostly because it gave us an answer we did not want to hear.
Thanks to the four projects
This analysis was only possible because Tabliss, Bonjourr, nightTab and MaterialYouNewTab run their bugs, requests and arguments in the open. In this product category that is the exception rather than the rule: we do not do it ourselves, and neither do the large commercial extensions. Documenting nine years of product development in public is a gift to everyone who comes afterwards — competitors included.