Features overview

🖥️ Main interface tips

When using the default backgrounds, hover your mouse on the background credits at the bottom left corner of Bonjourr to get the EXIF info of the photo (when available).

Clicking the Download icon will download the photo to your computer at its highest possible resolution.

⚙️ General settings tips

Accessing the settings panel

There are two ways you can access the settings of Bonjourr:

• Click on the ⚙️ icon in the bottom right corner.
• Hit the esc key of your keyboard (while focused on the page).

Show all settings

Bonjourr has lots of settings. To make it easier for newcomers, we hide most of the more advanced ones by default. You can enable them by toggling Show all settings at the very top of the settings panel.

Hide settings icon

When toggling the Hide settings icon option, the icon is still clickable at the same position as before.

📌 Tab appearance

You can customize the text and icon (called favicon) your browser uses for Bonjourr. Text is limited to 80 characters, and icons can only be emojis.

The emoji option might be limited by your browser:

• Firefox has imperfect scaling/alignments (GitHub issue).
• Microsoft Edge will only show the silhouette of the emoji.
• Safari doesn't support it at all.

Here is how you can write emojis:

• Windows: WIN + . (Windows Key + dot)
• macOS: CTRL + CMD + Space
• You can also copy and paste them from the Internet: unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.

🖼️ Backgrounds

Bonjourr lets you fully customize your new tab experience with beautiful and dynamic backgrounds. Whether you prefer curated photos, immersive videos, or your own local files, there are plenty of options to make it feel personal.

Images

Bonjourr offers several ways to customize your background with beautiful images. Here's how it works!

Bonjourr Daylight

By default, Bonjourr uses the Unsplash API to fetch its backgrounds from a feature we call Bonjourr Daylight. We select them manually and store them in four different collections that change according to the time of the day:

• One for the morning (2h around sunrise).
• One for the day.
• One for the evening (2h around sunset).
• And one for the night.

Unsplash Collections

You can use any collection on Unsplash as a background source in Bonjourr. This allows you to carefully curate your own images from Unsplash. To do so:

1. Find one you like by going to unsplash.com, search for a subject and go to the Collections tab.
2. Once you've clicked on the collection you want, check out its URL. What you want is the ID, which is the string of random letters and numbers. For example, if your collection's URL is https://unsplash.com/collections/2170139/wolfdogs-of-unsplash, the ID is 2170139.
3. Head back to Bonjourr and after having checked Show all settings at the top of the settings panel, paste the ID in the Unsplash collection field. You can add multiple collections by separating them with a comma.

Unsplash Search

If you have a theme in mind, you can use the Unsplash Search feature and let Unsplash do the work for you: just type in a keyword and it will start fetching backgrounds related to that keyword. You can even set several of them by separating them with a comma.

Videos

Thanks to Pixabay's free video library, Bonjourr lets you set videos as your backgrounds. They're fun, dynamic, and bring your homepage to life in a way static images can't.

However, videos can be more demanding on your device. They require more processing power, which can slow things down and drain battery faster. Also, since video files are larger than images, a fast internet connection is recommended for a smooth experience.

Additionally, we try to go out of our way to never integrate AI generated content to our background collections. If anything AI were to slip through, be sure to tell us about it via email and we'll gladly remove it.

Bonjourr Daylight

Just like with images, Bonjourr also offers curated video backgrounds that change with the time of day.

Pixabay Search

Similar to Unsplash Search, you can enter keywords in Bonjourr to fetch related videos from Pixabay’s library.

Local files

The local files option allows you to easily set images from your device to Bonjourr.

You can add multiple files from your device by pressing Add. You can add multiple files at once. Bonjourr automatically handles duplicate files, which means you can select every images on your folder, and only the new ones will be uploaded.

A drawback of local files is that they can't be synced between devices. This is a technical limit and security browsers have set up when it comes to extensions.

Local backgrounds can be moved vertically, horizontally, or zoomed. Toggle the option by pressing Move after selecting an image.

Reducing the zoom to its minimum sets the size automatically.

Solid color

The solid color option allows you to choose a specific color for your background if you like to keep things especially minimalist.

Texture overlay

Textures are overlays on top of any background. There are many types you can try, and they will typically look better over a blurred background or a solid color.

Most textures can be edited through their color, opacity and density to get to the perfect result.

Fade in time

You can specify the speed at which the backgrounds fade in when you open a new tab. Color backgrounds are always at 0ms. Reducing the fade in time to 0 will make the new tab page flicker, because the background image needs to load.

🔗 Quick Links

Quick links are a way to easily manage the websites you visit regularly.

Basic usage

You can add Quick Links by going to the settings of Bonjourr, in the Quick Links section. They are editable if you right click on them (or long press on mobile), which allows you to change their titles, URLs, icons and delete them.

You can easily reorder your links by drag and dropping them, just like you would do on a phone. Additionally, dropping a link on another link will create a folder that contains them both. You can also edit that folder via right click.

Importing your links

Bonjourr integrates a way to import the existing links from your browser. To access it, click the Import bookmarks button. Depending on your browser, you will be shown multiple groups of links you will be able to import, such as your most visited websites and your bookmarks toolbars.

You can select one or multiple groups, and then import them.

Syncing

Some importable groups, such as bookmarks, can be synced with your browser if you decide to click on Sync with browser before importing. This means they won't be editable in Bonjourr, but Bonjourr will update its links whenever you edit your bookmarks directly in the browser.

Some groups (like the "Most visited" on Chrome) are only importable while synced and will get updated in Bonjourr whenever your browser decides to do so.

Google Apps

If you use Chrome, Bonjourr will offer you to import Google Apps as a way to replicate Chrome's default startpage's behaviour.

Link groups

You can organize your links with link groups, an optional feature you can enable in settings. To add a group, hover to the right of the group titles until you see the + icon. You can rename and delete groups by right clicking on them. Deleting a group will delete all the links it contains.

Just like with folders, you can:

• Drag and drop links from group to group.
• Drag and drop groups to reorder them.
• Rename a group by right clicking it.

You can pin groups by selecting Pin this group after opening the context menu from the group title. This will make it so the group is always visible.

Icons

Link icons are retrieved by our homemade service favicon-fetcher. If you find that a website is missing its icon, you can create an issue on GitHub or send us an email, and we will do our best to fix it.

Custom icons

The Icon input you see when editing a link allows you to set a distant URL to any image file you want on the Internet. This URL can be:

• A distant URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico.
• A locally hosted URL: http://127.0.0.1:4321/favicon.ico.
• A Data URI smaller than 8kb: data:image/gif;base64,R0lGOD...AA7.

But not a:

• File path: file:///Users/Me/Pictures/flowers.png.

Some services like postimages.org, imgbb.com or Imgur allow you to upload images to their server and give you a direct link to it. Although we are not affiliated with them, this can be a good and easy solution if you want to upload your own custom icons.

Cache policy

Icons from favicon-fetcher are stored in the browser cache for a year. As long as the browser cache is not cleared, icons are not fetched (or updated) by the page. However, if the browser cache is often cleared or storage space is limited on your device, icons will have to be fetched from our service again.

Icons you add manually from a distant URL will have a different cache policy that we are not in control of, which might cause the icon to be fetched often or even every time.

⚠️ Notice: as a security measure, local paths like file://, browser settings links like about:config or chrome://extensions can't be added. However, localhost: links will work just fine.

🕰️ Time and date

The analog clock feature has many options you can play around with and get to really cool styles.

Some things to know:

• Clicking the 🌙/☀️ icons on the sliders will switch from black to white.
• The analog clock background is blurred when its opacity is above 0.

World clocks

World clocks allows you to add multiple clocks with different timezones. Removing the name of a world clock will remove the clock entirely.

🌤️ Weather

Precise geolocation needs access to your device's GPS. Some browsers or systems might not allow access based on its privacy setting. macOS / Safari often causes problems.

If there are multiple cities with the same name in your country, it might cause an issue. A good trick to fix this is to choose the name of the closest city with a unique name.

Bonjourr doesn't have a "Refresh weather" option yet, but you can still do it by manually toggling between units (Celsius → Fahrenheit → Celsius).

Detailed weather

Detailed weather allows you to easily go to a weather provider's website to get a detailed weather report. Once enabled, you can click on the weather widget to go to your chosen website.

⚠️ We are in no way affiliated with MSN, Accuweather, Yahoo!, or Windy.com. These websites offer reports from different data provider, hence the choices.

✍️ Notes

Notes uses Markdown to create titles, lists, and checkboxes. To transform a line, just add these characters at the start of a line:

• # large heading
• ## medium heading
• ### small heading
• - classic list
• [ ] checkbox (notice the space between the brackets)
• [x] checkbox, checked

Currently, other Markdown features, such as italics, are not supported.

Keybindings

You can use these keyboard shortcuts while editing your Note. Replace `Ctrl` with `cmd` on macOS.

🔎 Search bar

Suggestions

Suggestions are provided by our own API. You can learn all about it and its source code here.

Custom search engine

There are many search engines available by default in Bonjourr, and you can even add others if needed. To do so, select Custom in the Search engine option of the search bar. When the URL request input appears, simply paste in the URL of the search engine and replace the searched text by %s.

For example, if you search "coffee" on YouTube, you'll see that the URL will be https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=coffee.

In this case, you just need to replace coffee with %s, giving you this result: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s.

Paste it in the input and you'll now be able to use the corresponding search engine from Bonjourr.

This method will work with the vast majority of search engines, making Bonjourr compatible with almost all of them.

🗣 Quotes

The quotes widget can fetch quotes from multiple sources:

• By default, our open source quotes API available in multiple languages. These are general motivational or inspirational quotes that the community can manage through pull requests.
• The InspiroBot API, an AI that generates seemingly inspirational quotes, but with a humorous twist. It parodies traditional motivational quotes from the point of view of an AI. Although we are not affiliated with InspiroBot, we've always found this service fun and thought it'd be nice to have it in Bonjourr. It is important to note that it's at least 10 years old and has nothing to do with the recent generative AI trend.
• The Kaamelott API, quotes from a french comedy TV show. Only available in French.
• Stoic quotes that reflect the Stoicism philosophy.
• Hitokoto, japanese inspirational quotes.
• Custom, add your own quotes directly from Bonjourr's UI.
• URL, add quotes from a distant CSV file.

Importing your own quotes

There are two ways you can import your own quotes: directly from Bonjourr, or from a distant URL. In both cases, here is the formatting your quotes need to adopt:

Author, Your quote.
Author, Your second quote.

With the custom quotes option

Once the custom quotes option is selected, you can simply add quotes to it by respecting the formatting shown above.

This option is limited to 8kB of text, which is about 50 regularly sized quotes. This is because Bonjourr uses storage.sync to store data, and each object is limited to 8kB. If you need more quotes, we advise using the URL option instead.

With the URL option (CSV file)

Select the URL option to link Bonjourr to the direct URL of a CSV file that contains all your quotes.

The easiest way to do this is to use GitHub Gist, a service that allows you to very easily create and host a file:

1. Create an account on GitHub if you don't already have one, and log in.
2. Head to the GitHub Gist page.
3. Give your file a description, like "My Bonjourr quotes".
4. Give it a filename, like bonjourr_quotes.csv. It can be anything as long as it ends with .csv.
5. Start typing your quotes with the formatting shown above (you'll be able to edit them later if you want).
6. Once done, you can hit the Create secret gist button. It will save the file and show you what it looks like as a table.
7. Click the Raw button, copy the URL of the page that opens and paste it in the URL input of Bonjourr. Voilà!

📚 Fonts

Bonjourr gets its fonts from Fontsource. If you want to see previews of the fonts Bonjourr offers, please visit fontsource.org.

📄 Page layouts

There are 3 different page layouts to choose from: single, double and triple column. Each layout saves the position and alignment of your widgets independently.

These options only affect the current layout:

• Widget toggle (enable switches)
• All options in grid toolbox
• Reset layout

💾 Settings management

Bonjourr allows you to export all your settings into a file. You can use this feature if you want to save them or share them to someone. You will in turn be able to import said settings into any instance of Bonjourr.

To do so, simply go to the bottom of your settings pannel, then click the Export button in the settings management. Your file will be downloaded. On your other instance of Bonjourr, click the Import button and select your previously exported file. Bonjourr will reload and all your settings will be applied.

Synchronization type

Bonjourr has multiple ways to share its settings between instances. In all cases, all settings will be synchronised except local backgrounds. For now, only the native browser syncing is automatic.

Browser

Bonjourr is by default configured to use the automatic syncing features of both Firefox and Chrome. If you log into your Mozilla/Google account on your browser and have syncing enabled in your browser, Bonjourr should get synchronised to other instances of the same browser on other devices.

Github Gist (cross browser)

Bonjourr also has a way to synchronise its data accross multiple browsers thanks to GitHub Gist (for example, if you use Chrome and Firefox at the same time).

Here's a step by step guide on how to configure it:

1. Select "GitHub Gist" in Synchronization type.
2. Log in to GitHub and create an authentification token by following this guide on docs.github.com, or by following the steps shown below:
3. Go back to Bonjourr and paste your token in the Authentification token input. Paste that token in as many Bonjourr instances as you need to synchronize.
4. From there, you can either use the Get button to download your settings from the server, or the Send button to upload them. The Server status area helps you by showing when the last upload was made.

Bonjourr is not affiliated with GitHub, and no connections to api.github.com are made until you select this option AND enter a valid token. More details on our privacy page.

Distant URL

This option is essentially the same as importing a settings file from your computer, except you will do it from a distant URL. As it removes the step of having to transfer the settings file to every single device, this could be handy for power users who might need to set up many instances of Bonjourr at once.

Simply host your settings file somewhere (pastebin.com can be a good choice), enter its direct URL in Bonjourr and click the Get button.

⌨️ Keybindings

Notes

Refer to the notes section.

❤️ Supporters notification

The supporters notification was introduced with Bonjourr 20.4 and is our way to thank people who support us on Ko-Fi. It appears at the start of each month and reflects the donations of the previous month.

If you'd like your name to appear in the supporters notification, you can donate on Ko-Fi. If you'd like to donate without having your name appear in it, be sure to send us a message when you donate.

The supporters notification can be fully disabled in the settings panel, Show all settings first, then Supporters notification in the "Notifications" category.