Bas Fijneman

Operations - Turn every new tab into your personal dashboard

by•
Most new tab extensions show you the weather. Operations shows you your work. Projects with their links and notes in one card, a browsable bookmark library, a vault for snippets and tokens, a Pomodoro timer, a water tracker. Five themes to match your taste, with a theme generator and custom layouts on the way. Everything lives in your browser, nothing on our servers. Built by two indie makers from the Netherlands who needed it themselves.

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Bas Fijneman
Maker
šŸ“Œ
Hey Product Hunt šŸ‘‹ Bas here, one half of Studio N.O.P.E. (a small Amsterdam studio run by Tijs and me). We built Operations because our browsers were a mess. Twenty tabs open by 9am, half of them forgotten by lunch, and every new tab was a tiny detour from whatever we were actually trying to do. So we replaced the new tab page with the stuff we actually reach for, instead of staring at a blank Google search bar fifty times a day: → Projects, with their links, notes, and tools all grouped together → A bookmark library that's actually browsable → A vault for the keys and snippets we kept copy-pasting → A Pomodoro timer and a water tracker, because we needed both → Five themes to choose from, with more customization on the way It's local-first. Everything lives in your Chrome profile, nothing on our servers. It works across all your Chrome profiles. And we're just getting started, a full theme generator and customizable layouts are coming soon. We've been using it ourselves for the past month and it's genuinely changed how we work day-to-day. Everything's where we expect it, nothing falls through the cracks anymore. What would you want on your new tab page that we haven't built yet? Tijs and I will be in the comments all day. Bas
Ciprian Balanica

Sounds mad cool, I'll give it a try. Is it Chrome only?

Bas Fijneman

@nair0Ā Thanks man, for now it is Chrome only but we can port it to Firefox very quick if needed!

Tijs Luitse

@nair0Ā what browser are you using?

Johan Cutych

super cool! feels like a super power to run tabs like this!!!

Bas Fijneman

@johancutychĀ Thanks Johan! It really is, there is so much more clarity going on during my days working with Operations! Feel free to try it out!

Tijs Luitse

@johancutychĀ <3 let us know if you are missing anything!

Martin Zokov

Looks really sleek and exactly the kind of per-project view that I wanted

Bas Fijneman

@martin_zokovĀ Thank you Martin, really like to get your feedback!

Tijs Luitse

@martin_zokovĀ whoopp, have fun while using it!

Joseph Landry

In the age of "ADHD brain", this feels genuinely helpful in getting work done and avoiding unnecessary distractions. Especially as a fellow founder, I end up spending a lot of time opening a tab to do one thing and then seeing all these news popup, social feeds, etc that take my attention away.

Bas Fijneman

@joe_setpointĀ That "open Chrome to do one thing, leave 20 minutes later having scrolled" loop is exactly what pushed us to build it. We put the news feed on the new tab page on purpose, gives the feed-itch one contained space instead of letting it ambush you mid-task.

Won't fix attention, nothing will. But shrinking the surface area turned out to matter more than I expected.

What's the worst offender for you?

Curious Kitty
What’s the typical breaking point that makes someone switch—are they leaving a tab manager because it feels slow/clunky, because sessions/groups don’t match how they think, or because they don’t trust cloud sync—and how do you handle that switch moment (import, setup time, and avoiding ā€œbookmark graveyardā€ relapse)?
Bas Fijneman

Hi @curiouskittyĀ thanks for taking the time looking at Operations. To answer your question:
The breaking point we see most isn't speed or sync trust, it's "bookmarks don't match how I think." People organise bookmarks by topic ("News", "Tools", "Articles") but work by project ("Client X redesign", "side project Y"). The mismatch means you eventually stop opening the bookmark menu, because what you need is never neatly there. Sync trust comes up too, Operations is local-first for that exact reason, but it tends to be downstream of the organisation problem.

That's why we built around project cards instead of folders. Each card is a project with its own links, notes, todos. When you sit down to work on Project X, everything for Project X is one click away, instead of buried under a generic "Tools" folder shared with everything else you've ever saved.

On the switch moment specifically:

- Import: we pull from Chrome bookmarks directly: one-click during onboarding, no manual re-saving. The honest follow-up: most people import everything and then realise 80% of their library is dead weight. So the bookmark library is built around pruning as you go, not "import once and done."

- Setup: projects are built manually: there's no existing "project" structure to migrate from, you're defining how you actually work. That manual moment is intentional.

- Graveyard relapse: project cards have natural lifespans (project ends → archive the card). Bookmarks have no scope, they accumulate forever. With cards, the unit of organisation matches the unit of work, which seems to be what keeps things from rotting.

What made you ask? In the middle of a switch right now, or evaluating one?

Ramit Koul

A must have extension for your browser!

Bas Fijneman

@ramitkoulĀ Thank you Ramit, Let me know if you have any feedback!

Sagar Kalra

Love the "ambient accountability" idea turning a reflexive action (opening a new tab) into a moment of intentional awareness. I've noticed the products that actually change behavior are the ones that insert themselves into existing habits rather than asking you to build new ones. Does this sync with any external goal or habit trackers, or is it self-contained?

Bas Fijneman

Hi @sagar_kalra1Ā ,

You've named it better than we have. Products that insert into existing habits beat products that ask you to build new ones, every time. That's the whole reason this works. Opening Chrome is already a reflex, we're just changing what's on the other side of the click.

Self-contained today, you're right. Pomodoro and hydration are the only tracking-style features built in. That said, if there's demand for a habit tracking module inside Operations, we're absolutely open to building it. Pomodoro and hydration started exactly that way, as small things I wanted to nudge gently in the same surface. A habit tracker fits the pattern.

What would the ideal version look like for you? Daily check-ins, streak visualisation, longer-form reflection, something else?