devo VS ankiTab

This looks very nice, thanks for sharing it. I really like the way the settings pane works, being able to see the change right away instead of the browser.

Since many people have shared theirs, I have also built a new-tab extension for a few years ago, it displays Hacker News, Product Hunt, GitHub Trending and a few more platforms on the grid, I have ~2k people using it: https://github.com/karakanb/devo

I will experiment with this settings design to incorporate sth similar in Devo, thanks for the inspiration!

You might enjoy this one even more: https://github.com/karakanb/devo

I generally agree - a new tab should, for the most part, be distraction-free.

However, with some cleverness, you can add content to the new tab page that adds value - e.g. AnkiTab (https://github.com/corollari/ankiTab) to help you review your decks. Sure, it's a minor distraction, but it's time-bounded (unlike a news feed), and theoretically it's a net gain if your decks contain knowledge that's genuinely useful to you.

Firstly, I want to say that I never looked into how the anki infrastructure and everything works. I've found the comment I was thinking about. The context was a browser extension that lets you do reviews whenever you open a new tab, and for that connected to the anki service, basically doing a sync each time. Now, dae explains that a sync after a delay results in reloading the data from disk on the server, which on scale affects hosting costs.