Chrome: Any way to keep New Tab page from showing recent pages?

[rshudson82]

I would love to be able to have just a simple Google search box whenever I open a new tab. I don't need it to show me recently closed tabs or recently visited sites or any of that nonsense, because most of the time it shows pages that I opened once and will likely never need again. I have bookmarks for frequently accessed sites, and those can stay in my bookmarks menu, where they belong. I don't want to completely disable remembering history, but if that is the only option I will go with it. Is this at all otherwise possible?

 

[itsthatbriguy]

This doesn't quite do what you want, but switching right away to Incognito Mode stops Chrome from displaying your Most Visited sites on each new tab. For whatever reason, Chrome doesn't have a "Set Homepage" option in Settings.

 

[electricpete]

There is a Google search box above the recent pages. So I don't understand the problem, unless you are wanting to hide your browsing history from others. I'll assume that is the case.

If you visit a website that you don't want others to know about, you can use menu / history....then click the x at right of website to delete that one website from history...or else "clear browsing data" at bottom to clear all.

Or else go to incognito mode before visiting the website and it will never show up in your history (similar to itbg's suggestion above...I guess he's suggesting to go incognito all the time by switching right away upon entering chrome.)

Note the new incognito tab (vs new tab) brings up a page that has address/search at the top with no history shown (no recent websites regardless of whether visited them in incognito mode or not). But has that spy image which I guess might tip others off that you're hiding something.

 

[mcbtrain929]

To piggyback onto Chrome questions:

Does anyone know if there is a way to default the download destination thru Chrome to an SD Card, not to the phone storage? The Note 4 Browser has an option to select between downloading stuff to the SD Card or internal storage, but I don't see such an option in Chrome.

Let me know, thanks.

 

[rshudson82]

It's not about hiding pages; I always use Incognito mode for that. This might seem stupid, but it's purely an aesthetic desire on my part. I just don't want all that crap cluttering up my clean minimalistic New Tab page. I can't figure out why Google wouldn't make this a choice in Settings, but if there's no way to do it, there's no way to do it. Thanks for your help.