How to hide most visited sites in Chrome’s New Tab page
Google Chrome’s default New Tab page includes a search box and displays thumbnail shortcuts for users’ most visited sites. However, what if users don’t really need the most visited sites included at the bottom of Chrome’s New Tab page? There are a few ways users can remove those thumbnail shortcuts from the New Tab page, but Chrome doesn’t include an option to turn them off within its Settings tab.
How can Users Delete Most Visited Sites?
1. Delete Each Shortcut Separately
Users can manually delete each thumbnail shortcut on the New Tab page. To do that, click the Edit shortcut button at the top right of a thumbnail shortcut to open the window shown directly below. Then users can click the Remove button to erase it.
2. Delete Browser Data
- Users can remove all the most visited site shortcuts from the New Tab page by deleting browser data. To do that, click the Customize and Control Google Chrome button to open the browser’s menu.
- Select More Tools and click Clear browsing data to open the window shown directly below.
- Select the Advanced tab on that window.
- Click the All time option in the Time range drop-down menu.
- Select the Browsing history, Download history, Cookies and other site data, and Cached images and files check boxes.
- Then press the Clear data button.
3. Add the Remove Most Visited Pages Extension to Chrome
Users can remove most visited page shortcuts with the Remove Most Visited Pages shortcuts extension. That extension actually redirects the New Tab page to the Google homepage, which is almost exactly the same as the default New Tab page. However, users can’t customize the page’s background as it doesn’t support themes.
Click Add to Chrome on the Remove Most Visited Pages page to add that extension to the browser. Thereafter, the browser’s URL toolbar will include a Remove Most Visited Pages icon on it to highlight that the extension is on. The Google New Tab page will no longer display any page shortcuts so long as the extension is on. Users can turn off the extension by entering ‘chrome://extensions/’ in the URL bar and then clicking the button at the bottom right of the Remove Most Visited Pages box.
4. Turn Off the Top Sites From Site Engagement Setting
- Some Chrome users can turn off New Tab page’s most visited sites shortcuts with a Top Sites From Site Engagement flag option in earlier 2018/2019 versions of the browser. To do that, enter ‘Chrome://flags’ in the URL bar; and press the Return button.
- Enter ‘Top Sites from Site Engagement’ in the search flags box at the top of the page. However, note that the Top Sites from Site Engagement option isn’t included in latest version of Google Chrome (v76).
- Select Disabled on the drop-down menu for the Top Sites from Site Engagement option.
- Then press the Relaunch Now button to restart Google Chrome.
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So, that’s how users can remove most visited sites shortcuts from the New Tab page. Alternatively, users could just add New Tab page extensions to Chrome instead. Extensions such as Infinity New Tab give users more customizable New Tab pages that don’t include most visited site shortcuts.
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