Google recently released version 77 of its popular browser Google Chrome for various operating systems, which includes many visual features and changes. One of the new features is the ability to customize more elements of the New Tab pages, giving you more options to personalize them according to your preferences. However, as of now, this feature is still experimental; so you will need to follow some simple steps to activate it if you want to modify the usual appearance of the New Tab pages, and perhaps in future versions of Google Chrome, they will be made visually available to everyone.
If you are using version 69 of Google Chrome, you may know that starting from this version, a new option has been added that allows you to add a custom image as a background for the New Tabs, which we highlighted in a previous article. However, Chrome 77 offers more options, such as getting a new background every day, or editing the shortcuts section, or changing the color and theme of the browser.
While these options were supposed to be visually available to users in this new version, Google decided at the last minute before releasing the version to make this feature experimental without providing any details about the reason. Instead, this feature has now become an experimental feature that requires you to complete some steps to activate it, let’s see how.
First of all, make sure to install the latest version of Chrome browser. If the browser is not automatically updated to Chrome 77, you can go to the About Google Chrome page from the settings or download the latest version from the official website. After updating, type “chrome://flags” in the address bar and press Enter, which will take you to the Experiments page where experimental features are located.
Now search for “Chrome Colors menu” through the Search flags bar at the top and click on the Enabled option. Repeat the same step for “Custom color picker for Chrome Colors menu” and “NTP customization menu version 2”. Then the Chrome browser will ask you to restart, press Relaunch Now to activate the new feature.
After activating the feature, you can click on the Customize button in the bottom right corner of the New Tab page and a popup window will appear consisting of 3 sections: Background, Shortcuts, and Color and theme. In the first section, you can change the background of the New Tab page. As in previous versions, you can choose a suggested image from Google’s images or upload your own, but you will notice a new option in this page, which is the Refresh Daily option at the top that will automatically set a new background every day.
Moving to the Shortcuts section will provide entirely new options as shown in the following image, allowing you to control the shortcuts of the sites displayed on the New Tab page. Selecting My shortcuts will display the shortcuts you choose, while Most visited sites will show the most visited sites according to your browsing history. There is also an option to Hide shortcuts that helps you get rid of all website shortcuts on this page if you do not use the shortcuts section at all.
In the Color and theme section, you can change the browser theme by choosing a color combination as suggested by Google or using the color pickers to select a color that suits your personal taste. This theme is applied to both the background of the New Tab page and the browser toolbar itself. In previous versions, this required downloading external themes from the Chrome Web Store. Overall, any changes you make in any of these sections should be applied permanently after clicking on the Done button, so don’t forget that.
And that’s all about the new customization tools for the New Tab page in Google Chrome, but Chrome 77 includes many other changes and improvements to protect shared data between websites.
