Chrome New-tab override

What is this?

This Chrome extension allows you to choose a website that will be opened automatically when you open a new Chrome tab. Chrome doesn't allow changing the contents of a new tab using the app settings, but an extension can override the content to your liking.

Setup instructions

1. Download the repository (clone it or download it as zip file).
2. Put it anywhere on your computer (and unpack if zip file).
3. Open newTab.html with any editor and update the URL to anything you like, your favorite news site, your own homepage or the original google search page.
4. Open Chrome and go to the extensions page (chrome://extensions/).
5. Enable the development mode in the top right (As this is an extension that is not in the web store, this is required to load raw extensions, as Chrome can't verify its origin).
6. Hit load unpacked extension and select the folder containing the files.
7. Open a new tab and confirm the changes made to the new tab (Chrome will ask once if the changes to the new tab are okay).

You can change the URL any time by just once again updating newTab.html.
Don't forget the https:// at the start of the URL. We like our browsing secure, don't we?

To remove it, go back to the Chrome extensions page, remove the extension and delete the files from your disk.

How does it work?

When you enable the extension, Chrome looks into its manifest:

{
    "name": "NewTab Override",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "manifest_version": 3,
    "description": "Minimal extension to override Chromes new-tab page. See: https://github.com/FabianK3/chrome-new-tab-override",
    "chrome_url_overrides": {
        "newtab": "newTab.html"
    }
}

There it finds the "chrome_url_overrides" which points to the newTab.html file.

This file contains a HTML meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://www.google.com/" />

It instructs the browser to instantly (0;) refresh the document, in this case https://www.google.com/, therefor opening the site. It now looks like the new tab is the choosen web page.

Project status

This project is complete and frozen, no pull requests will be accepted or issues resolved.
This was originally just a simple thing for my personal use, I thought I hand it out to whoever likes the feature.
I'm sure there are already other extensions that do this, but I like it simple and wanted to know how Chrome works.