Lightning Storm
a night thunderstorm seen from a hillside

What you see on every new tab

Lightning Storm puts you on a hillside at night, looking up at a thunderstorm. A billowing tower rises on the left with its anvil spreading to the right, a low bank of cloud rolls across its front, and rain hangs in curtains under the base. Behind it sits a second, hazier cell, and far off along the horizon a line of distant storms flickers on its own.

• Four kinds of lightning: sheet flashes that light the cloud from inside, back flashes that throw the tower into silhouette, forked strikes to the ground that stutter like the real thing, and slow crawlers that snake along the cloud base.
• The rhythm: a flash or two every second on average, with a burst of several in a row every half minute or so.
• The colour: the mood drifts between warm amber and gold and electric blue and violet over a couple of minutes, and every flash picks its own tint near it.
• The ground: a ridge of dark hills scattered with town lights, under a sky with stars where the cloud leaves it open.

Nothing is a video. The cloud is a real volume computed on your graphics card every frame, each bolt is built as it strikes, and the flashes light the cloud around them.

What it reacts to

• Mouse: the view shifts slightly with your cursor.
• Click: click below the cloud and a bolt strikes there; click the cloud and it flashes from inside.
• Music: with music sync on, bass raises the storm's temper, with more flashes and a brighter cloud, and a hard kick fires a strike.
• Night: after dusk the sky is darker and the stars brighter, and the flashes come a little less often but hit harder.

Free or Pro?Pro

Ambient New Tab is free to install, with three free themes. Lightning Storm is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, and it unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as we release it. You can preview Lightning Storm 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 (or Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera).
2. Open a new tab and click the Themes pill in the bottom-right corner.
3. Pick Lightning Storm. Done.

Questions

Can I make lightning myself?

Yes. Click under the cloud for a forked strike to the ground at that spot, or click the cloud itself for a flash inside it.

Is Lightning Storm free?

It is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year. It unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as it is released. Cancel anytime.

Is it heavy on the graphics card?

It is one of the heavier themes, so the cloud is computed at reduced resolution and scaled up, and it lowers that resolution by itself if your machine is struggling. Like every theme it runs only while a New Tab page is on screen.

Does it work on my phone?

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

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