How to Block Doodle in Chrome's 'New Tab' page?
My goal is to block the annoying Google "doodles" (i.e. animated soccer-related promos, etc.) that appear in Chrome when a New tab is opened.
Here's what's been tried so far:
Use AdBlock Plus to specifically block the doodle. This actually works very well on the Google.com page itself but as it turns out, opening a New Tab (Cmd-T) doesn't actually load Google.com. It loads some kind of plug-in where AdBlock has no influence.
To which you're probably thinking, "Just change your homepage to Google.com in the Settings". Strangely, this doesn't work. Chrome will hijack the request to Google.com and redirect it to the opaque plug-in described above.
I also tried to be clever by setting my start-up page to a more specific URL like https://www.google.com/search. It resulted in the same outcome. I even tried using a tinyurl.com redirect for a start-up page, but this still doesn't work. Chrome still hijacks the request if it knows that the end result is the Google search page.
The only thing that's been remotely helpful is this extension which replaces the New Tab plug-in with a blank page. This is a step in the right direction. The Doodle goes away and I can perform my search from the URL bar. But the ideal scenario would be to make use of the default Google New tab page but without the annoying doodles.
Do you know of a clever way to accomplish this?
There's a new flag (use-google-local-ntp) that allows disabling New Tab Page service worker and therefore also Google Doodle. Currently it's available in Google Canary 61 so let's hope it lands in stable (soon).
chrome://flags/#use-google-local-ntp
Switch it to "Enabled" and restart Chrome. I wrote about it in this blogpost.
EDIT: It's already available in the stable Chrome 60.
Maybe not a complete solution, but if you go into Settings and change your omnibox search engine to something that's not Google, then the new tab page will only show recently visited pages (no huge Google logo and whatnot). You can still set your homepage to Google for quicker access to searches, but for most of my omnibox searches, Bing works acceptably. If Google wants to play it that way...
I tried Chad Decker's idea given in his comment: "If I click the "manage search engines" button, could I create my own entry that (in)directly points to the Google HTML page and avoids the plugin?"
I copied the URL of the default Google search engine to a new name, and made that the default search engine, namely:
{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:bookmarkBarPinned}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:instantExtendedEnabledParameter}{google:omniboxStartMarginParameter}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}
For me this works (on openSUSE 64bit, latest updates, October 31, 2014). So I don't have to see those ugly Halloween doodles any more. ;-)
In Chrome Version 79.0.3945.130 (Official Build) (64-bit) I had to:
- Go to Menu -> More Tools -> Developer Tools
- In the lower panel click "Request blocking"
- Add
local-ntp/doodle.js
Enjoy!