Fruumo is a new tab page for Chrome that shows a customized page on new tab. It shows weather, current date and time, temperature, search for bookmarks as well as web search, most accessed pages, rss feed, Facebook notifications, recently closed tabs, and more!
Phew! That was quite some information to see in a new tab page of Chrome, and reading this might make you feel that the page would be cluttered, but Fruumo organizes everything in a very nice manner so that the page actually looks pleasant. Check out the screenshot below:
We have reviewed many new tab page extensions for Chrome but I strongly believe Fruumo is the best new tab page for Chrome. I find it almost perfect. It shows all the information I would want to see when I open a new tab in Chrome.
Let’s go through this extension in detail to see what makes it the best.
Show Weather and Temperature on New Tab Page of Chrome:
On top Left and Right side of new tab page in Chrome, this shows your local weather and temperature. You can specify your location so that it shows correct weather of your location. Now, on Left side, it shows current weather. When you click on that, it shows weather forecast for later in the day. And when you click again, it shows weather forecast for tomorrow.
Similarly, on the right side, it shows current temperature. And when you hover over that, it shows minimum and maximum temperature. You can choose to see temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
Search Web, or Search Through Bookmarks or Applications:
Another useful feature of Fruumo is that it provides search box on new tab page that lets you search for your bookmarks, search for installed applications, and even search web. For that, just start typing and Fruumo will start showing the results. It will search through your bookmarks and apps and show you results from that. To open any result, just click on that. In case it is not able to find a matching result there, it will automatically do a web search using Google.
See RSS Feed, Facebook Notifications, Recently Closed Tabs, Installed Apps:
The features I mentioned above are what are available on the main interface of Fruumo in a prominent manner. However, apart from these, Fruumo also has a toolbar at the bottom which is actually quite powerful. It has small icons and clicking on each brings up the respective feature.
Here is what the toolbar looks like:
See RSS Feed: The first icon in the toolbar is to see RSS feed. You can configure any RSS feed and when you click on this icon, you see the recent items from that feed. You can click on any item in the feed to open it in the original website. This feature is of course not a replacement for your feed reader, but if there is important feed that you want to track frequently, you can configure that here.
See Facebook Notifications: Second icon is for Facebook. If you have a new notification on Facebook, that will be indicated by a number on this icon. When you hover over this icon, it will also show number of unread messages. If you click on the icon, it will show all the Facebook notifications. I found that it was showing even those notifications that I had already read and cleared from my Facebook.
See Installed Apps: Next item shows all the installed apps in Google Chrome browser. You can click on any app to run it. It also provides you option to quickly uninstall any app.
See Recently Closed Tabs: This icon shows you tabs that you had closed recently, and clicking on any of them would open that up again. Of course, you can just press Ctrl+Shift+T to open the last closed tab, as we covered in keyboard shortcuts for Google Chrome.
Weather Forecast: Fruumo shows weather for today and tomorrow at top of the page. If you want to see forecast for 5 days, you can click on this icon. It will also show minimum and maximum temperature for 5 days.
Settings: This is where all the magic happens. Click here to modify all the settings of Fruumo. You can specify the RSS feed you want to track, provide your Facebook credentials, provide your city to show weather and temperature, choose a background photo, and many more options. All the options are clearly laid out and easy to configure.
Verdict:
I already mentioned, I strongly believe Fruumo is the best new tab extension for Google Chrome out there. I have been using it since last couple of weeks and I just love it. I think I will use it for quite a long time. Some of the features I think that could be improved would be to add a section to see Facebook feeds on the page itself, Twitter feed, as well as RSS feed, so that there won’t be any need to click on the respective icons to see that info. Of course, that might slow down loading of the new tab page, but I am sure this information could be cached in the background. Nevertheless, in its current form as well, Fruumo is pretty good.
You can get Fruumo here and do let me know your experience with it in comments below.