Chrome 33 Nixes Option To Fall Back To Old 'New Tab' Page

An anonymous reader writes "On Friday, Chrome 33 was shipped out the everyone on the stable channel. Among other things, it removes the developer flag to disable the "Instant Extended API", which powers an updated New Tab page. The new New Tab page receieved a large amount of backlash from users, particularly due to strange behavior when Google wasn't set as the default search engine. It also moves the apps section to a separate page and puts the button to reopen recently closed tabs in the Chrome menu. With the option to disable this change removed, there has been tremendous backlash on Google Chrome's official forum. The official suggestion from Google as well as OMG! Chrome is to try some New Tab page changing extensions, such as Replace New Tab, Modern New Tab Page, or iChrome."

Should be a public API for this

[Darkon]

Doesn't help that the new tab page lives inside a protected "chrome://" namespace which extensions are almost entirely prevented from touching, and uses private APIs for things like showing the most used pages, meaning that anyone wanting to put it back how it was by writing an extension has to reimplement everything from scratch.

Re:I guess I'm geezering..

[Tough Love]

It is saying the Google is slipping down the slippery slope of evil, ignoring massive negative feedback as usual, and demonstrating clearly why dominance of their non-open open source browser is a bad thing for everybody except Google.

Re:Chrome

[glavenoid]

Ctrl+k puts focus in the omni/address bar with a "?" which tells chrome you want to search rather than go to a url. Alternatively, you can add the ? as the first character in the address/omibar and this will also initiate a search rather than going to the site.

Re:what a fuss about nothing

[bolek_b]

Firefox has this ability as well, it is not so obvious, though.

• Go to a page with some search field, for example amazon.com title page.
• In Firefox Search Bar, expand its pop-up menu; one of the items should be "Add Amazon Search Suggestions". Click it
• Once again go to Search Bar pop-up menu, this time for "Manage Search Engines..."
• Select the appropriate row and click "Edit Keyword..."
• Type some reasonably short abbreviation, such as "ama"

You are done, now you can type "ama cthulhu" and there you go. I have there shortcuts for Google (keyword "g"), Wikipedia ("w"), YouTube ("y"), IMDB, CPAN and a couple of other sites and it is really efficient and comfortable.

Also in Chrome 33: Welcome to Walled Garden

[kav2k]

You think that's the real problem in Chrome 33?

Well, compare that to this fact: on Chrome 33 on Windows (and Windows only) all non-Chrome-Web-Store extensions are forcibly disabled and will not install anymore, with the exception of pushing them through domain group policy.

http://www.chromium.org/develo... [chromium.org]

So, say goodbye to anything not blessed by Google, like extensions that allow "the unauthorized download of streaming content or media".
Unless you want to use the Dev channel as an official workaround, or are content with loading extensions unpacked, with no auto-update.

It's not like I don't understand the problem, I've seen rampant Chrome crapware on clueless people's computers. But this is heavy-handed.