missing the homepage most visited thumbnails

by

they just disappeared today. there's no undo or restore all button at the bottom, like what happens when i accidentally hit the x on one of the thumbnails. anyone have any idea what's going on? the homepage is now just the google search bar. it look a lot like google.com but without the "google search" and "i'm feeling lucky" buttons under the bar.

edit: here's a solution i found HUGE thanks to u/Aboss (i hope i got that right)

In chrome://flags

*#top-chrome-md to 'Normal'

*#ntp-ui-md to 'Disabled'

Now like you said before, disappear bug happens again but you can fix it by:

*#use-google-local-ntp to 'Enabled'

this will get you the old thumbnails back instead of those ugly new ones.

edit edit: how do i unbold that stuff? the bolded lines just have the pound sign (or hashtag sign) in front of it.

edit edit edit: also a huge thanks to everyone in the comments for figuring all of this out and solving this for all of us here!

54 thoughts on “missing the homepage most visited thumbnails”

  1. I just noticed mine are gone too. Maybe they’re upset I changed 3 flags to make Chrome look like it did a week ago.

    EDIT/UPDATE: If I re-enable the three Material Design flags and restart the new tab icons come back, but so does the new look.

    Reply

  5. It’s a bug under upgrading to new design homepage

    Im currently looking at it 🙂

    ​

    Update:

    Note: the fix for M69 will be available later today with a browser restart.

    For users on M68 the fix will rollout over several days so if you want the fix sooner you’d need to force an update from Chrome Settings-> About Chrome. The issue there is both on English and non-English locales.

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  6. Same.. just randomly poof, can’t see them anymore. I wonder if they are trying to force people to update.. which I’m not doing. The new version runs slower, has less features, and looks silly.

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  8. Same here, manually updated Chrome but it did not fix it. Tried changing Material Design flags from Default to Enabled and Disabled, but no luck with that either.

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  14. The fact that this affected all of my chrome/chrome fork installs including one that has been sitting on version 50 this is some bullshit being pulled by google

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  15. I updated through the: menu -> help -> about chrome method, and all my thumbnails reappeared. As another said they’re back but they look ugly and less detailed. They’re basically just blown up versions of the standard bookmark thumbnail (no image of the last view of the site) with a menu that allows you to edit their name and URL. You can remove them now though, for those who wanted that.

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  17. Found a way to fix the issue on at least v60-67 of chrome. change the flag #use-google-local-ntp to enabled and it should work like it did before. versions of chrome without this flag are out of luck

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  19. Finally solved this problem by changing chrome search engine. In my case, it seems that the search engine text box in the tab page has a conflict with the thumbnails. When you change your chrome search engine to something else(you can set up another google search, just DO NOT use the default one) and all the thumbnails come back. Hope this will help before the bug fixed. (version: 69.0.3497.81 ) And the solution of [Gottmituns2016](https://www.reddit.com/user/Gottmituns2016) also works.

    Reply

  22. this reminds me why I had to turned off the “forced” update by chrome manually before. Yet, my recent reinstalled windows still hasn’t configured this and now get caught by the buggy update/unwanted ugly features of the new chrome 69…

    damn the forced update. has spent hours to trouble shoot it, and now rolling back to older version.

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  24. This is so infuriating. I mean, I know we’re just prawns in Google’s game and really have no recourse but fucking with a UI without warning or a clear way to revert is not nice.

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  26. That’s some serious BS, as a developer I wonder how TF do they pass an update like this?
    I lost a whole morning of study trying to fix this thanks to my OCD I just couldn’t ignore this shit since I’m using the browser every time in this study, reinstalled 3 times cause I didn’t want to use SpeedDial on this machine, then checked on another computer that had an old version and in the process of updating Chrome on that PC I lost stuff.

    ​

    Also these new tabs are absolutely awful !

    Many thanks to people who found the fix for both this issues.

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  31. Thanks dudes, what a gigantic pain in the butt. Works now. That never happened before. All better now, appreciate it. One less minor annoyance in life solved!

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  32. This is great. Either I suck at searching or most of the google forum help links I went to cannot understand how to answer this simple question. Ill always check reddit first now for my problems =D

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  33. Changing my search engine worked, now I get a horrible list of my most visited site’s icons instead of the thumbnails. How the hell did this affect older versions of Chrome?! I want my thumbnails back, this shit with making things “look simpler” is just hideous, it’s like it’s made for mobile when it’s being used on a PC version!

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  40. Just used this page for help in restoring my thumbnails. Got the help with exact directions even I, highly non-tech, could follow. Mission completed and thumbnails back. Thank you. (Reason I just signed up, help with my Chromebook possible.)

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  43. Had this happen to me today as well and almost stopped using Chrome completely. I had to do all three flags for it to come back.

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  47. The desktop is heading to the mobile direction. New tab stuff is slowly being removed so you can be fed with Google News in there. Changing “flags” to revert the changes will only work for a few months.

    Reply

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