Chrome's new tab page is the screen you see more than any other, and by default it is a search box on a blank background. Wallpapers Daily, the free Chrome extension from Wallpapers.com, replaces it with a full-screen HD wallpaper, and every tab you open shows a different one. Setup takes about a minute. One Chrome setting then makes the wallpaper the first thing you see when the browser starts, too.

Get Wallpapers Daily for Chrome

What Changes When You Install It

Open a tab and the whole window is the wallpaper. The logo sits faint in one corner and the wallpaper's name in another. Nothing covers the middle of the picture.

A Chrome new tab showing a full-screen city skyline wallpaper at golden hour

Everything else stays out of sight until you want it. Move the mouse to the top edge and a search box, category links and three buttons fade in: a clock, the next wallpaper, and Preferences. Move it to the bottom edge and you get the wallpaper's tags plus View, Download and More like this. Move away and they fade out again.

The new tab with the search bar, category links and the View, Download and More like this buttons showing

The extension fetches 12 wallpapers at a time and steps through them, one per tab, so you see a dozen different images before anything repeats. After 30 minutes it fetches a fresh set.

Pick the Wallpapers You Want

Click the gear to open Preferences. There are 12 categories to choose from: Aesthetic, Anime, Nature, Gaming, Dark, Space, Cars, Beach, Flowers, Cute, iPhone and 4K. Tick as many as you like. Picks are mixed evenly across them, so choosing Anime and Nature gets you both, not a run of one.

Below the categories, choose a feed:

  • Daily shuffles a wide pool from your categories, so it changes the most.
  • Popular draws from each category's top-ranked wallpapers.
  • Latest shows the newest uploads first.

Start with Daily. Switch to Popular if you would rather see the wallpapers other people download most.

The Preferences panel with clock settings, twelve wallpaper categories and the Daily, Popular and Latest feed options

Download the Ones You Like

Download saves the wallpaper as a JPG in a Wallpapers.com folder inside your Downloads folder. There is no dialog to click through. Wallpapers that are Premium-only on Wallpapers.com open on their own page instead, where the download options are.

The heart button saves a favorite in your browser, up to the 50 most recent. More like this and the tag chips open related wallpapers on Wallpapers.com.

One thing the extension does not do: it does not change your computer's desktop background. Chrome extensions can't. To use a wallpaper on your desktop, download it, then set it as the background in your system settings.

Add a Clock If You Want One

The clock is off by default. Click the clock button at the top, or switch it on in Preferences, and a large clock appears over the wallpaper. You can choose 12-hour or 24-hour time, show or hide the date, and set its opacity anywhere from 10% to 100%, so it can be a bold readout or a faint watermark.

A large clock and the date over a sunset sky wallpaper on the Chrome new tab

Install It

The extension is not in the Chrome Web Store yet, so you install it from Wallpapers.com in Chrome's Developer mode.

  1. Go to the Wallpapers Daily page and click the green Download the extension button.
  2. Unzip the file. You get a folder called wallpapers-daily. Keep it somewhere permanent, like Documents, because Chrome loads the extension from that folder every time it starts. Delete the folder and the extension stops working.
  3. Type chrome://extensions into the address bar and press Enter.
  4. Turn on Developer mode with the switch in the top-right corner.
  5. Click Load unpacked and choose the wallpapers-daily folder.

Open a new tab. If Chrome asks whether to keep the changed new tab page, keep it.

Chrome may show a notice about developer mode extensions. It appears for every extension installed this way. Dismiss it and the extension keeps running.

Make Chrome Open on a Wallpaper

Chrome opens on the New Tab page by default, so for most people the wallpaper is already the first thing they see. If you once set Chrome to Continue where you left off or to open specific pages, it skips the new tab page at startup. Switch it back:

  1. Go to chrome://settings/onStartup.
  2. Choose Open the New Tab page.
  3. Close Chrome and open it again.

Now Chrome starts on a wallpaper, and every tab after it shows another. If you rely on Chrome restoring yesterday's tabs, keep that setting. You still get a wallpaper in every new tab you open.

What It Can Access

The extension asks for three things: storage, for your settings and favorites; downloads, to save wallpapers; and access to wallpapers.com, where the wallpapers come from. It does not read the pages you visit or your browsing history.

It also runs in Edge and Brave, which load Chrome extensions the same way. Use edge://extensions or brave://extensions in step 3.

Ready? Download Wallpapers Daily and open a new tab.