Recently, when we covered 5 tab extensions to fancify chrome some readers mailed me, asking how to open blank tabs for privacy concerns? That is, they wanted to remove or hide most visited or recently closed websites from chrome’s new tab page. Normally, when we open new tab in Google chrome, home page speed dial similar to opera displays most visited sites. Under normal circumstances, this is pretty useful as it provides facility to go to our favorite site with a single click. But sometimes, this is not at all favourable, especially when you want to hide your activities. At office or in home there are some situations when you don’t want to publicly display your recent visits for privacy reasons. Possible solutions for this problem include – using incognito mode or removing website thumbnail from list. But this isn’t permanent solution for this recurring problem. Let’s discuss 2 potential solutions for this:
Temporary Hide Frequently Top Visited Web Pages
This one is simple, infact inbuilt in Chrome so you don’t have to download anything. All you need to do is click on Change Page Layout button and uncheck most visited and recently closed sites. Check out below image for instructions.
Permanently hide Thumbnails from New Tab
You can remove site thumbnails/images from chrome new page by clearing all your history. For this go to Options > Under the hood > Clear browsing data. Now to permanently stop these thumbnails from coming back, install Blank New Tab Extension. This extension forces chrome to open about:blank in new tab i.e. blank page. Now you can easily hide all those commonly visiting sites by above two methods. Here is a short video for the same:
