How to Remove Websites from Tabs in Chrome Homepage

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 the most visited or recently closed websites from Chrome’s new tab page.

Normally, when we open a new tab in Google Chrome, the home page speed dial similar to Opera displays the most visited sites. Under normal circumstances, this is pretty useful as it provides the facility to go to our favorite site with a single click. But sometimes, this is not at all favorable, especially when you want to hide your activities. At the office or 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 thumbnails from the list. But this isn’t a permanent solution to this recurring problem. Let’s discuss 2 potential solutions for this:

Temporary Hide Frequently Top Visited Web Pages

This one is simple, in fact, built into Chrome so you don’t have to download anything. All you need to do is click on the Change Page Layout button and uncheck the most visited and recently closed sites. Check out the below image for instructions.

Permanently hide Thumbnails from the New Tab

You can remove site thumbnails/images from Chrome’s 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 a new tab i.e. blank page.

Now you can easily hide all those commonly visited sites by the above two methods. Here is a short video for the same: