Supermium

[Dave-H]

Glad you like Supermium, I've been using it for ages now on XP, and it's become my standard browser even on Windows 10.

To answer your questions -

1. Unfortunately, Supermium has no internal mechanism to set itself as the default browser on XP.
    It can be done with a lot of tedious registry editing, or by using a utility like PortableRegistrator.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/portable_registrator.html

2. This one is easy!
    Just type chrome://flags/#custom-ntp into the address bar, enable it, and fill in the URL that you want your new tabs to display.
    Restart the browser and there you are!

3. All I can suggest for that is to try different themes. Hopefully one of them will make things more readable for you.
    I'm sure that almost everything can probably be customised if you know how, but I don't have that level of knowledge of Chromium customisation I'm afraid.

Cheers, Dave.

[waltah]

#2 is done.  By setting new tab pages to Luxxle this largely covers for the fact that SM allows default search engines only if chosen from a small list.

#3 remains frustrating:  I cannot be the only one using SM with less than perfect vision and as far as I can tell all themes and color scheme customizations give fine gray lines and white icons on a very light background.  There may be worse scemes for visibility but it's hard to think what they'd be.   However I expect that as SM becomes more popular this will get fixed.  Windows and virtually all of the popular Win brwosers over the years had this right: SM (or Chromium's?) new bad idea won't go without an option indefinitely. 

Unless, of course, I'm still missing something obvious.  That could happen.

#1 The software you suggest is Win 7 and later I believe.  My 'modern' machine (this one) is XP.   I can probably do the edits by hand but I'll wait until I'm sure everything is stable.   Though come to think of it most other browsers are capable of setting themselves as the default so switching away from SM should be easy if ever needed.  

Supermium is tops.  

Thanks for the help!  Back to working on Win 98 on a Dell 4600.  

[Dave-H]

PortableRegistrator 1.5 certainly works with XP, I don't know about any later versions.
I can upload it for you if you can't get a version which works.

FWIW I use the Classic Blue theme, which always looks very pleasing to me, but it may not help with your issue of course.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

On 1/16/2026 at 2:04 PM, waltah said:

3. My eyes are not the best and the three icons at the upper right corner are basically just a gray blur.  Either whte on a dark backbround or black on a lighter background would be fine but I cannot find a way to get either one.   Or extending the mouseover color change of the 'X' icon would also work.  But the other two get lighter which is no help at all 

Nearly all of the bad-eyesight folks that I know all "swear by" anything-and-everything "dark mode".

Why not try a "dark theme"?  ie, something like this works in Supermium in XP+POS x86 --
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dark-theme-for-google-chr/annfbnbieaamhaimclajlajpijgkdblo

 

Normal Supermium:

 

Supermium + above-link'd Dark Theme:

Edited 15 hours ago by NotHereToPlayGames

[NotHereToPlayGames]

ps - If you download the .crx, all you have to do is modify the manifest.json *before* installing into Supermium and you can make the colors ANYTHING YOU WANT THEM TO BE.

You don't have to "find" a theme that you like, you control your own destiny and CREATE the theme using the downloaded .crx as a "template".
It can be easier if you find a "close enough" theme to what you WANT and then just modify to get it to EXACTLY what you want.

That's what I've been doing ever since migrating from XP+360Chrome (where I embedded my own skin/theme) to 10+Chrome.
For me, I really "hate" for Chrome to not LOOK LIKE everything else in XP.
And that extends to 10 where "active" and "inactive" Chrome windows don't by default LOOK LIKE everything else in 10.

This is a good source for all of the available "notations" that can be used - https://github.com/mike-u/EditChromeThemes