November Update: Chrome Extension, Team Portal, and more!
It’s been a while since we’ve written an original blog post. The reason is simple: we’ve been working so hard to improve our service that we couldn’t find time to let you know. Until this November. Want to know what we’ve been doing? Here’s a selection of our best efforts so far.
Chrome extension updates

A lot of our efforts went into improving the Chrome New Tab extension, as well as the Chrome Bookmarker Extension. We updated the code to comply with Manifest V3, a requirement by Google, which offers improvements in privacy, security, and performance. It will now load noticeably faster!
We haven’t updated the extension Firefox and Edge yet, but they will soon follow.
Together with the new code, we’ve also updated our screenshots and other marketing material. We hope you like it! And if you’d like to show your appreciation, you can leave a review in the Chrome Web Store. Many users have done this, and we genuinely love the support.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Gavin Mason (November 2, 2022)
I’ve used StartMe for many years now and find it invaluable. If you spend the time to tailor it to your needs anything and everything you use is just one click away and in a logical place. I think it’s brilliant and serves me very well indeed..
Team Portal Updates

Less visible but also important are the many changes we made to the Admin Portal for Teams. If you don’t have a team, you can skip this part, but if you do, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. We’ve made the Tabs more logical and visually appealing. In fact, the entire layout has been redesigned.
We’ve also added new features, like the option to manage role permissions with a simple set of toggles. For example, you can now disallow team members to create personal pages with their accounts. If you just want your team members to access your company information, you may want to switch this toggle ON.

Another interesting feature, requested by our clients, is the option to disable all third-party tracking code for an entire subdomain. This allows users to exclude Google Analytics and some other external server monitoring scripts from being loaded on your subdomain. Excluding these tags enhances the online privacy of your team pages.

November Widget improvements
Other development efforts in or before the month of November went into minor improvements of the widgets, we’ve made available to our users. For example, it’s now possible to add a description to every widget, not just to Bookmark widgets. Just click the Edit button and you’ll see the Description field.

We’ve also improved the styling of our Image Gallery widget and made it possible to upload more than one image at once.
One Final Question
Besides these three highlights, we’ve managed to solve a lot of minor bugs, cleaned up redundant code, and answered a lot of support questions. This leaves us with just one question: do you appreciate these changes? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments!
22 Replies to “November Update: Chrome Extension, Team Portal, and more!”
Great work!
Thanks!
Been using Start.Me PRO for about 3 weeks now! Support is excellent. I moved 1,600 bookmarks from FireFox to start.me and sorting thru what I want to keep is taking time. Organizing everything into widgets is making my life a whole lot better!
Thanks for your wonderful comment. “Making my life a whole lot better!” – that’s just what we were aiming for. Thanks for going PRO, and joining the family, David!
I am absolutely in love with start.me and I’ve been using it for well over 3 years now. I would love to see some addition to project management tools such as jira integrations. In example, there’s a connector between Miro and Atlassian that allows me to add cards with a small jira ticket preview that automatically updates straight from the Jira board. (status, name, assignee)
It would be an amazing addition if I can add those high-priority tickets straight in start.me to follow
Thanks for your feedback, Dave! It’s wonderful to see that you’re asking us to make start.me a better productivity tool, as we’re always looking for new ways to add value for our users. I’ll ask our development team to investigate Jira, as I feel that it has a lot of potential. A single widget to follow high-priority tickets from your start page: that would indeed be useful. We already offer something like that in our Trello widget, but on a board level. So, stay tuned!
Hi and thanks so much for the whole team making updates to Start.me. Being soon 25 years in the IT-business it has been a life changer for my daily routines of doing business. I’ve set it up so that when ever I open a new tab, start.me opens. I have combined my work and personal links which is personally ok with me and it is my daily dashboard and an important Jumping point. I’d like to see a more visually pleasing and highly visually usable Google Calendar integration. There are so much calendar apps, but only a fraction of them are able show a busy calendar well.
Thanks for your comment and compliments, Daniel! We’re happy to learn that you find our service useful. And as for the calendar widget: it’s been on our to-do list for quite some time, as we recognize that it could do with an update. What functionality would you like us to add, besides making it more beautiful? We’re listening!
Yes, it’s very nice! I wish you the stamina to improve it here and there over time that will eventually force it to be noticed to a very wide audience as at some point it will just break the viral world of mouth threshold and it will start grow even faster. 🙂 Regarding the Google Calendar widget – the most important parts are a working today and week view. Not sure if a monthly view is doable in small size. Many commercial apps/services do the mistake of not focusing enough on readability which is the make or break it factor to a calendar. With calendar event titles I would say it’s ok of not seeing the actual full calendar event title if there is to be seen X chars because then everyone usually knows what is tha event. That is far more useful than cramming everything in with a small font to a limit where it is unreadable. Customisability is important. Probably everyone would love to see the full day 08-22. Regarding the day view – I think Ticktick really nailed with their two-column IOS widget how to show a single day in a box format. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYMZi4HUYAIsKuX?format=jpg&name=large
All the best for you!
Thanks for explaining, Daniel! I also think the Ticktick view is nice and clean, so I’ll take it to the development team. Stay tuned! 😀
Love it! Thanks for keeping start.me fresh. It’s my start page and new tab page that I use all day, every day.
Great to hear this, Brady! We love to be of service!
I love using the platform. I love being able to share my pages / copy other’s pages and put them into my own. Great feature.
Thanks for letting us know, Rebecca!
It’s hard to think that Start.me could have improvements! But you did it! I use this tool every day. It has become essential. By renewal time, I is my goal to purchase the lifetime subscription. I love it!
Great to hear that start.me has become invaluable to you, Ricardo! We appreciate any subscription you’re willing to invest in. And, should you ever think of something to improve start.me, don’t hesitate to let us know!
StartMe has been my browser home page for many years. Nothing is better. It is attractive and flexible and gathers exactly what I want to see when I open my browser. Thanks guys. Keep up the good work.
We’ll do just that, Bert! Your encouragement is much appreciated!
I’ve been using start.me for quite a few years. I initially was looking for something to use in my classroom as a “splash page”. But, it soon became my main web site home for all of my classes. I have our Google Calendar embedded as well as our school Twitter feed. Then, it contains tons of links for students to get to resources we use in class. It made the process of creating a library and a home for my students. I personally love the ability to create custom icons and make beautiful backgrounds with my own images.
Wonderful to hear this, Charles! We love to hear how you use start.me in the classroom: it’s one area where we really hope to make a real contribution!
Excellent work, and a great product!
Thanks for letting us know, Michael!