Second ReadHow do you change the new tab page in Chrome?
15 September 2026
Chrome gives you a surprisingly small amount of control over the new tab page from settings alone. Almost everything people want to do with it requires an extension, and it is worth knowing exactly what that trade costs before you install one.
Chrome's own settings let you change the background image and the shortcut tiles on the new tab page, and nothing else. Click the pencil icon in the bottom right of a new tab to reach both.
To change what the page actually is, you need an extension that declares a new tab override. Chrome then hands that extension every new tab, and its page replaces the built-in one entirely.
What you cannot do is set the new tab page to an arbitrary URL from settings. The homepage and the startup pages accept any address; the new tab page does not. This is deliberate, because the new tab page sees a great deal of behaviour and Chrome will not hand it to a site without an explicit extension install.
Why did my Chrome search box disappear?
The search box in the middle of the new tab page disappears when an extension overrides the page, because Chrome's new tab page is no longer rendering at all. The extension's page is showing instead, and Chrome's widgets are part of the page you replaced.
This is not something the extension chose and it is not something it can undo by being more careful. There is no API that draws Chrome's search box inside an extension page, and Chrome blocks its internal pages from being embedded in a frame. Every new tab extension has this constraint.
The address bar is unaffected and still searches. Extensions that care about this build their own search box, which can hand the query to whatever default engine you have set. Second Read does that, off by default and turned on in settings, and passes the query straight to your own engine rather than routing it anywhere.
Do new tab extensions see your browsing history?
A new tab extension sees your browsing history only if it asks for permission to, and Chrome tells you at install time when it does. The two permissions to look for are "Read your browsing history" and "Read a list of your most frequently visited websites".
The second one is what powers those shortcut tiles on custom new tab pages. If an extension shows you your most visited sites, it has that permission, and the data is sensitive enough that it is worth deciding deliberately rather than clicking through.
An override by itself needs no permissions at all. Check the list Chrome shows you, and check it again after an update, because a new permission triggers a fresh prompt and a disabled extension until you accept it.
How do you get the default Chrome new tab page back?
Remove or disable whichever extension is overriding it. Open chrome://extensions, find the one that mentions the new tab, and toggle it off; the built-in page returns immediately with no restart.
If you cannot see which extension is responsible, Chrome shows a small prompt the first time an override takes effect, and chrome://settings/manageProfile will not help. Disabling extensions one at a time is crude but quick, and only one can hold the override at a time.
If a new tab page you never installed keeps returning after you remove it, that is not a normal extension and is worth treating as malware. Chrome's Safety Check, under Settings, will find most of them.
Is it worth replacing the new tab page?
Replacing the new tab page is worth it only if the replacement does something you would otherwise never get round to, because the page you are giving up is genuinely useful and you open it dozens of times a day.
The honest test is whether the new page is something you want to see when you are about to do something else. Dashboards, feeds, and to-do lists fail this, because they interrupt the thing you opened the tab for. A single short passage passes it, because you have read it before you have registered it as an interruption. That is the whole design of Second Read, which shows one thing you saved and nothing else.
Anything that makes the tab slower to appear fails regardless of content. The page has to be drawn on the first painted frame, or it gets removed within a week.