Google does it again

[Mooncatt]

A while back, Google added spam to the bottom of the Chrome new tab page instead of the useful bookmarks and recent tabs links. For a while, you could edit the flags to turn that junk off and go back to the old way. I guess they didn't like losing out on that ad revenue and the most recent update removed the ability to disable those "snippets," as they were called. I should've known to read the reviews before downgrading to the newest version.

Any suggestions on how to roll back to the last version, Chrome 57 I believe?

 

[B. Diddy]

You're talking about the Chrome app for Android, right? Although I agree that moving in this general direction is somewhat annoying, it still seems innocuous to me. All I see is a little something peeking up at the bottom of the screen, and in my case, it happens to be information telling me what I downloaded recently on Chrome. Then there's Recent Bookmarks below that, and then farther down are the "Articles for You," which I'm guessing is the spam you're referring to. Or are you seeing something different?

 

[Mooncatt]

Yes, I'm talking about the mobile Chrome app.

If they set that stuff up under the old bookmarks and recent tabs buttons, it wouldn't be so bad. But I use both of those a lot and they make you now have to go through extra clicks to access the via the regular menu. On the earlier versions with these changes, there was a couple of flags within Chrome's development tools (or whatever you want to call it) that you could disable to revert it to the old style. Those flags are now removed, baking this new feature into the app.