Back in the late 90s when Windows 98 was still a craze, one of the Windows features that everyone loved was to set the background wallpaper for the Windows desktop. And it made sense for those days when internet was limited to the dial-up modems or checking the email messages and most people used the PC for various offline applications like Microsoft Office. But now the roles have switched, few people spend time using the offline applications and more time is being spent using web browsers. So why not start setting the wallpapers or backgrounds for the web browser’s new tab page just like the backgrounds for the Windows desktop?
Google has been working on this interesting concept and the new version of Chrome Canary already carries an experimental feature to set any custom image to be used as your new tab page background. However this feature must be enabled first. Here is how:
- Launch Chrome web browser, type chrome://flags in the address bar and press Enter.
- In the search box type backgrounds and you will find the New Tab Page Background Selection feature.
- Select Enabled from the options show next to this feature and when asked relaunch the web browser.
- Now try opening a new tab by pressing Ctrl+T, in the new tab page you will see a small gear like icon, click on this icon and select a wallpaper image.
- You should be able to see the new wallpaper image now when you open a new tab now.
If the backgrounds are not showing up, you may have to clear the Chrome cache. Also, this feature might be disabled depending how you have configured your web browser. You can see it working in fresh installation of Google Chrome Canary using the above steps.
This is only an experimental feature at this point and might not make it to the final Chrome release channel, but while it is available for your use why not make good use of it and show off your Chrome web browser’s new custom backgrounds to everyone.