I used to open a new tab, see a blank page, then immediately open a news site in a second tab. Every single session. The new tab was wasted space.

I fixed that.

What News Widget Dashboard does

Replaces your Firefox new tab with a live news feed. Categories you choose — tech, finance, sports, world — show up as cards with headlines and summaries. Click any card to go directly to the article.

The feed is live. Reload the tab, the headlines are current.

What I did not want to build

A news aggregator with its own backend. That means: servers to maintain, an API to pay for, a service that breaks when the backend goes down. Extensions that stopped working because the developer server went offline are frustrating.

News Widget Dashboard reads news directly from RSS. No server in the middle. No account. If the feed is live, the extension works.

Privacy

No trade-off. The extension fetches RSS feeds, which are public URLs. It does not send anything. Your browsing history is not involved.

Why the new tab is the right place for news

You open new tabs constantly. If news is there, you are already looking at it. No dedicated app to open, no news site to load with its own trackers and ads.

Install it

News Widget Dashboard — Firefox Add-ons

Free. No account. Works in Firefox.

This is one of 11 Firefox extensions I built — all free, no-account, no-server. See the full series for the others.