how to remove thumbnails from google home screen

Rename it or point it to a new URL to keep it but have it point elsewhere.Īrguably removing the thumbnail is easiest but you do have the option to change it.

Select Remove to completely remove the thumbnail.

Hover over a thumbnail and select the three dot menu icon that appears.

This can work to hide any guilty secrets from view if none of the other solutions work for you. If you don’t mind the majority of the thumbnails on the new tab page but don’t want one or more of them, you can manually remove or rename them. That will change with use though so keep on top of everything as you go.

Scroll to Privacy and Security and select Clear Browsing Data.įor the next couple of times you open a new Chrome tab, nothing will show as the browser data has been cleared.

Again it’s less than ideal but it contributes to privacy by wiping your browsing history as well as those thumbnails. You can also use ‘about://blank’ instead of a website URL if you prefer.Īnother less than stellar workaround is to clear your browser cache so Chrome has nothing to display on the new tab page.

Enter a URL of a page to open immediately when Chrome starts.Īgain, this only stops those thumbnails appearing on the first page after starting Chrome and not subsequent tabs you open.

Scroll to On Start-Up and select Open a Specific Page or Set of Pages.

Open Chrome and select the three dot menu icon.

It’s less than perfect but it’s another workaround. This doesn’t stop the thumbnails appearing when you open new tabs but will only change the page shown on startup. You can control what page is presented when you first start Chrome.

Set a new tab pageĪn alternative to adding the extension is to modify the new start page. This is an excellent way to remove those new tab page thumbnails from view. You won’t see the search box in the center or anything at all so don’t be surprised if you’re presented with a purely blank screen. Using this extension, you should see a blank web page when you open a new tab.

Select Add to Chrome and select Add extension.

Navigate to the Empty New Tab Page extension for Chrome.

It works well and even supports the new Chrome Dark Mode if you use that. The Empty New Tab Page extension for Chrome effectively disables those thumbnails and removes your frequently visited sites from view. There are some workarounds though, which I’ll show you here. There is no setting currently available to stop it from happening.

In the current version of Chrome 78, there is no way to disable those new tab thumbnails from within the browser itself.

How to remove thumbnails from google home screen