Tabliss

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 838 words

Tabliss will not show you whether your Jellyfin container is up, and if that is what you came for, close this and read about Homepage. Tabliss (MIT, TypeScript, 2,780 stars) is a new-tab page: a wallpaper, a clock, a greeting, a handful of quick links and small widgets, all configured and stored inside your browser. It sits in our dashboards category because people search for it alongside the real ones, but it solves a different problem, and the self-hosting story is unusually thin, in a way that is worth understanding before you spend an evening on it.

Everything lives in the browser, including your settings

There is no backend. The extension (Firefox and Chrome) keeps your configuration in the browser's local storage, which is why it runs on 64 MB of nothing and never needs a database. That has two consequences that surprise people. First, your layout does not follow you between browsers or machines unless you export the settings JSON from the settings panel and import it elsewhere. Second, "self-hosting Tabliss" means hosting the static web build of the app, not your data. Anyone who loads your hosted copy gets a fresh, blank Tabliss stored in their own browser. It is closer to hosting a calculator than hosting a service.

The one thing the hosted copy does buy you is independence from the extension stores and from the developer's own web.tabliss.io deployment, plus the ability to fork the widget set.

Building and hosting the web version takes 10 minutes

The repository is a standard Node project. The web target builds to a static folder that any file server can hand out:

git clone https://github.com/joelshepherd/tabliss.git
cd tabliss
npm install
npm run build:web
# output lands in dist/ (or the folder the build prints); serve it statically

Serve that directory from Caddy, nginx, or a plain python3 -m http.server for testing. There is no configuration file on the server side, nothing to back up, and no ports to think about beyond your web server's. If you want it in Docker for tidiness, a two-stage Dockerfile that runs the build and copies the output into an nginx image is the whole recipe.

Then comes the part that actually decides whether this is useful: getting your browser to open that URL on a new tab. Firefox needs an extension to override the new-tab page with an arbitrary URL. Chrome and its derivatives likewise require a "custom new tab URL" style extension, because the new-tab override is an extension privilege, not a setting. At which point you are installing an extension anyway, and the official Tabliss extension does the same job with less friction. This is the honest reason most people who try self-hosting Tabliss end up back on the store version.

Where it does earn a place in a homelab

The pattern that works is a shared kiosk or family startpage: a hosted Tabliss on a subdomain, opened as the homepage (not new tab) in a browser that several people or devices use, with quick links pointing to your internal services. Because the config is per-browser, you set it up once on each device and it stays. Pair the quick links with a real service dashboard behind them; Tabliss becomes the pretty front door and Homarr or Glance become the status board one click in. Some people also like it as the default page on a wall-mounted tablet, where the weather widget, clock and a large background photo are the entire requirement.

Widgets worth knowing: the Unsplash and custom-image backgrounds, a search box that can target a self-hosted SearXNG via a custom search URL, quick links, a todo list, and a notes widget. All of them store data locally, so the todo list on your laptop is not the todo list on your desktop.

What it is not

It does not poll anything on your network, it has no authentication because it has nothing to protect, and it cannot render Docker status, download queues or uptime. Momentum users switching for privacy reasons get the same feel with zero telemetry, which is the real win the catalogue's Momentum alternatives page describes. Anyone wanting a single pane of glass for services should skip it entirely and install one of the dashboards that talk to APIs.

What I'd do

Install the Tabliss extension from the store, spend 5 minutes on a background and 6 quick links to the services I open daily, export the settings JSON once and drop it in my dotfiles. I would not host the web build unless I was setting up a kiosk device or a shared family browser, and even then I would host it next to a real dashboard rather than instead of one. It is a good-looking, zero-maintenance startpage, and pretending it is anything more is how people end up disappointed.