Gelato Smoke
four flavours of smoke on dark teal

What you see on every new tab

Gelato Smoke fills the New Tab page with four flavours of smoke, strawberry pink, orchid, orange and lime, curling over a deep green-teal ground. Where two flavours meet, the stronger one takes over across a narrow soft seam instead of the two mixing into brown, so each patch stays one clean colour.

Thin wisps look milky, like melted gelato. Where the smoke piles up thick it turns creamy and pale, like the top of a scoop, and the edges of the folds catch a soft gloss in a lighter shade of their own flavour. The clock and date stay white.

• Deep teal ground: the space between the smoke is a dark green-teal, never black, and thin smoke fades toward it.
• Three roaming sources: three unseen emitters loop around the page, each lap taking about seventy seconds, and every 45 seconds each one moves on to the next flavour.
• Cream on the crests: the thickest smoke is lifted toward cream, which gives the dense folds a scooped, whipped look.
• Soft corners: a light vignette dims the edges slightly, much less than on the darker themes.
• Never empties: the smoke is slowly drawn toward a drifting fold pattern, so it neither drains away nor piles up into one colour.

Gelato Smoke is a stable-fluids simulation: the velocity grid is advected, given swirl by vorticity confinement and made incompressible by 26 pressure passes each frame, while four dye channels ride on it with MacCormack advection to keep folds sharp.

What it reacts to

• Mouse: moving the pointer pushes the smoke and lays a trail of the current flavour, which changes every 20 seconds. The push dies away over a few seconds.
• Music: with music sync on, bass brightens the smoke and makes the emitters pour out more, treble brightens the gloss, and each kick puffs a burst of one random flavour somewhere near the middle.
• Night: after sunset the theme lowers its own brightness by about 15 percent, fading in over roughly 45 minutes. The Day/Night button in the Themes panel can fix it either way.

Free or Pro?Pro

Ambient New Tab is free to install, with five free themes. Gelato Smoke is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever, and it unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as we release it. You can preview Gelato Smoke full screen before you buy: open the Themes panel and rest your mouse on it. Changed your mind? 14-day refund, no questions.

How to get it

1. Add Ambient New Tab to Chrome.
2. Open a new tab and click the Themes pill in the bottom-right corner.
3. Pick Gelato Smoke. Done.

Questions

How is Gelato Smoke different from Gelato Light?

They share one fluid engine and the same four flavours. Gelato Smoke sits on a dark teal ground with white clock text, milky thin smoke and creamy crests. Gelato Light uses a bright aqua ground with dark clock text, colours that saturate almost at once, twice the swirl and a fibrous, shaded texture.

Is Gelato Smoke free?

It is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever. It unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as it is released.

Why do the colours not turn muddy where they meet?

Each pixel carries four separate dye amounts. When they are turned into colour, the strongest flavour is weighted far above the others, so a pink patch and a lime patch meet along a thin blended seam instead of averaging into brown or olive.

Does the smoke keep moving while I am in another tab?

No. Rendering stops the moment the New Tab page is hidden, so the simulation pauses and uses nothing. When you come back the smoke continues from exactly where it was.

Does it work on my phone?

No. It's a desktop browser extension for Chrome on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. If you're reading this on a phone, send yourself the link.

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