In my opinion, the new tab page on mobile leaves a lot to be desired.
- No customizable background image
- Pinned sites scroll right to left instead of filling the page vertically, but only if the background image is enabled. It does this if it is disabled, though. Just make this an option?
- ONLY 8 PINNED SITES? REALLY?
After disabling the ads and stats that I don’t really care about, about 60% of the new tab is taken up by black nothingness. Let us have as many pinned sites as we want, and a custom background option would be nice. Oh and make them fill vertically instead of scrolling, I don’t care about being able to see the background clearly, just… something other than black.
For reference to what I’m looking for, the Opera android browser’s speed dial does this perfectly. It even let’s you group sites together into folders. Opera gx is similarly featured, but doesn’t have the folder feature, and you can’t rearrange the pinned sites.
I’ve read some other topics that say the lack of a customizable background is for performance concerns… how performance intensive would it be to load an image from the phone instead of an internet library of landscapes? If anything it should be less, because you’re not using the network to load the image each time (or the same, if they’re downloaded to the phone and loaded from a cache).
I understand that new tabs differ between desktop chromium and mobile but like, wouldn’t you want the mobile and desktop experience to be as close as possible? This is why you’re developing an app. This is why everyone doesn’t just use “generic internet browser” on mobile, they want the unique features they’ve come to expect from the desktop version.
Yea, I’ve had this argument myself. I’ve heard, it’s hard to do (yet Edge does it easily?), performance reasons (yet Edge does it easily?), and Edge is Chromium based too.
Thus I ended up not having a background image at all, because I’d rather no image if it isn’t my image. In fact, I’d truly like developers to offer user customization first as a higher priority over cloud supplied backgrounds. It’s not as challenging as they have tried to tell me, and I certainly never accepted that. Used to write code for over a decade, sometimes I do question if those who say it’s hard (ninjas/mods), have actually any programming experience themselves.
It’s situations like this where while I agree with the Brave team most of the time, this isn’t one of those, and I do agree with the users.
EDIT: Just noticed your username, lol.
I totally agree the current layout wastes a lot of space. More pinned sites Redhumana com and vertical layout should be basic options.