All I really wanted was to configure a specific web page to show up when I open a new tab in Chrome. No less and definitely no more. But any existing Chrome extension I found wanted to do way more and was asking for all kinds of permissions. So I wrote my own:

1. A dead-simple configuration to set a site URL to which to forward.
2. No special permissions needed.
3. Can be used offline, even though that probably does not make much sense–unless some URL on your own machine should be your home page, which is certainly possible ... as long as you have a local web server.