Say goodbye to boring browser tabs with Pinterest’s new Chrome extension

Regular browser tabs are boring, and they need a little sprucing up.

Fortunately, the folks over at Pinterest seem to think so too, and today the company released Pinterest Tab for Chrome, a Chrome extension that greets you with a new image from Pinterest.

Pinterest employee Ludo Antonov writes in a blog post:

Your Pinterest Tab is packed with high-resolution photos from art-collecting and education resource Artsy, photo community 500px, and National Geographic’s photo community Your Shot, so there’s plenty to choose from. Awesome art, great moments in sports, funny photos…whatever you want. And you get something new each tab you open. Best of all, each photo is a Pin, which means you click through to Pinterest and visit the original site it came from to learn more.

Your calendar’s there, too, so you’re all organized and ready to kick off your day.

The extension prompts you to choose a category of pins when you open your browser and lets you switch categories at anytime by either clicking the “+” sign in the top-right corner. Conversely, you can pull up a new image by clicking the “refresh” button.

You can also pin anything you find on the Web by clicking on the Pinterest icon at the top-right of the browser toolbar.

And unlike desktop wallpaper, which fills your entire desktop but then is hidden by your many, many saved files, this extension works as you’re browsing the Web on sites such as, well, Pinterest.

Pinterest Tab, as fun and fluffy as it seems, is also a creative way to get Pinterest users and other people to discover content from Pinterest. Moreover, at the bottom-right corner, you can click on a button to get more information about the image and even navigate to the original pin. It’s discovery-meets-education-meets-beautiful-art, all in one little browser extension. As we’ve previously covered, Pinterest is hard at work on beefing up its discovery features, so this extension is a natural fit.

Pinterest Tab actually came out of an internal hackathon the company held, showing us one more time that great ideas can come from letting employees work on their own creative projects.