Animated dither wallpapers for Helium's new tab page

Turn any photo into a dark, gently moving new-tab background. Fine-grained dithering preserves the image underneath, slow light fields keep it from feeling static, and a shifting dissolve blends it into black so the clock and search stay easy to read.

What it does

• Applies animated blue-noise dithering without making the source photo look needlessly low-resolution
• Moves the texture, lighting, and lower-edge dissolve slowly enough to work as a background rather than demand attention
• Fades the photograph into black behind the controls, keeping them legible
• A clock, date, search box, and quick links
• A built-in image picker and shuffled rotation for an entire folder of photos
• Private, local customization: selected images never leave your browser
• Battery-conscious rendering capped at 15 fps, paused when the tab is hidden, and frozen when reduced motion is enabled
• No installation scripts, accounts, dependencies, or build step

Install it in Helium

1. Download this repository from Code → Download ZIP, then extract it somewhere you plan to keep it. Cloning the repository works too.

2. In Helium, open helium://flags/#custom-ntp.

3. Enable Custom New Tab Page.

4. Set its value to the full file URL for this project's index.html.

   On macOS, it will look something like:

   file:///Users/you/Hacks/custom-helium-start/index.html
   

5. Open helium://settings/onStartup and choose Open the New Tab page.

6. Open a new tab and enjoy.

Make it yours

Click the palette button in the lower-right corner to choose a wallpaper. The page resizes and saves it locally, so nothing is uploaded. You can return to a plain dark background at any time.

Choose a folder to replace the built-in rotation with all supported images in that folder. They are resized and stored locally in the browser, so the rotation continues across new tabs without retaining access to the original folder.

The default wallpaper pool is listed in config.js. Add images to the project and list their relative paths there to include them in the rotation. One is selected at random for each new tab unless a custom image or the dark background has been selected. The faint arrow in the lower-right cycles through the full pool in a new random order without repeats.

Want different quick links? Edit the links in index.html. The search box uses Google by default; change SEARCH_URL in app.js to use another search engine.

Privacy

The page makes no background network requests. It only connects to the internet when you submit a search or open one of the shortcut links.

About this project

This is an unofficial fork of mlemlabs/custom-helium-start, rebuilt around a lightweight WebGL2 dither effect. It is not affiliated with Helium or Imput.

The original start page is MIT-licensed. The shader is a standalone browser port of open-source work from Aura and Paper Shaders. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and licenses/ for complete provenance and license texts.