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I'm in the about:blank gang too, and I hate that in Safari on iOS you can no longer have a blank tab since a few versions. You can hide all the things on the "start page" but then you will still see the edit button.

Firefox displays a search bar, but yes, an empty new tab is good. The awesome bar is what I use to access the thing I intent to access when I press CTRL+T, whether it's an history search, or a web search, or an URL. The fewer things displayed on my screen trying to distract me, the better :-)

I like me some widgets, but pretty much the only time I see the bare desktop is when the machine restarts. So instead I put some in the menu bar (Mac's ‘tray’), in the dock and in the bottom corners around the dock. I'm using open-source ‘Stats’ for the menu; there's also BitBar iirc. The stock Activity Manager for the dock, and custom scripts in Hammerspoon for drawing anywhere on the screen, namely in the corners.