How to Set Your Chrome Homepage and New Tab Page

What's the difference between Chrome's homepage, startup pages and new tab?

Chrome treats these as three separate settings, and mixing them up is the single most common reason a change doesn't seem to take effect. Each one controls a different moment in your browsing session, and each lives in its own part of Settings.

Chrome only lets you set a true custom homepage; the new tab page is deliberately locked to Chrome's own shortcuts-and-search screen unless you install an extension that redirects or replaces it. That split trips people up because on a fresh install, the homepage and the new tab page can show the same speed-dial grid — until you change one and notice the other hasn't moved at all.

How to set your Chrome homepage on Windows, Mac, and Linux

Setting a homepage takes under a minute once you know where the toggle lives, since Chrome hides the home button by default. These steps are identical on any desktop platform.

1. Open Chrome and go to chrome://settings/appearance (or click the three-dot menu > Settings > Appearance).
2. Turn on Show home button.
3. Select Enter custom web address.
4. Type or paste the full URL, including https://.
5. Press Enter or click elsewhere — Chrome saves automatically, there's no separate save button.
6. Click the small house icon that now appears left of the address bar to confirm it works.

How to choose what opens when Chrome starts

Startup pages control what loads when you launch Chrome from a fully closed state — they have nothing to do with your homepage or what a blank new tab shows. Set them in their own section of Settings.

1. Go to chrome://settings/onStartup.
2. Choose Open a specific page or set of pages.
3. Click Add a new page and enter a URL, or click Use current pages to save every tab you have open right now.
4. Reorder or remove entries with the icons that appear when you hover over each row.
5. To return to Chrome's default, switch back to Open the New Tab page.

Chrome also offers a third option — Continue where you left off — which reopens your previous session automatically, tabs and all. That's different from a fixed startup list: it changes every time based on what you had open last. If you want a stable, repeatable set of tabs (a work dashboard, email, a calendar) rather than whatever happened to be open last, stick with Open a specific page or set of pages. If you regularly run dozens of tabs across several windows, Chrome's own session recovery can be unreliable after a crash — browsing the tab and session managers hub gives you an extension-based backup that holds up better than relying on startup pages alone.

How to change the Chrome new tab page

Chrome has no built-in setting to point the new tab page at a custom URL, and that gap is the single biggest source of confusion in this topic. You need an extension for that, and which one you pick depends on what you actually want a blank tab to do.

By default, a new tab shows a Google search box and a row of your most-visited shortcuts. The Customize Chrome pencil icon in the bottom-right corner changes the background image and which shortcut cards appear, but it can't redirect the page to a different site or add functional widgets — that customization is cosmetic only.

• Want a specific site (Gmail, a dashboard, an internal tool) to load instead of Chrome's default new tab? Install New Tab Redirect and set the target URL on its options page.
• Want a personal dashboard instead of a redirect? Awesome New Tab Page, Momentum, and Infinity New Tab replace the blank tab with shortcuts, widgets, and a search bar.
• Want a running to-do list on every new tab? New Tab Todo List turns the page into a checklist instead of a dashboard.
• Want a bookmarks-and-feeds start page? start.me is built for that rather than for minimalism.

Which new-tab extension should you actually install?

The right pick depends on whether you want speed, focus, or information density on every blank tab you open. Here's how the main options in this space differ from each other.

Does this work the same on Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS?

Yes — the settings pages and menu names are identical across Windows, Mac, and ChromeOS, because all three run the same underlying Chrome browser build. The real differences show up around device policy, not the steps themselves.

On ChromeOS, especially school- or work-managed Chromebooks, the Appearance and On startup settings can be greyed out or missing entirely because an administrator has locked them with a device policy — a small building or shield icon typically appears next to a locked setting. Homepage and startup pages also sync across your signed-in devices if Chrome Sync is turned on for Settings, which is convenient if you move between a personal Mac, a Windows PC, and a Chromebook, but it means a change on one device changes it everywhere you're signed in.

What about Chrome on Android and iPhone?

Mobile Chrome handles homepage and new tab differently from desktop, and iOS is by far the most limited of the three platforms.

• Android: Open the three-dot menu > Settings > Homepage, toggle it on, then choose Chrome's start page, New Tab page, or Custom web address and enter a URL.
• Android new tab: Picking Custom web address under Homepage can double as your new-tab behavior; there's no separate new-tab-only override, and Chrome for Android doesn't support the desktop extension ecosystem at all.
• iOS (iPhone/iPad): Chrome for iOS has no homepage setting and no custom new-tab URL — Apple's platform restrictions keep every iOS browser, including Chrome, on a fixed new-tab layout of shortcuts and recent tabs.
• iOS workaround: The closest option is bookmarking a page to your Favorites bar so it's one tap away from a new tab, or adding it to your iPhone's home screen as a web app icon.

Why does my Chrome homepage keep changing back?

A homepage or new tab page that resets itself after every restart is almost always caused by a browser hijacker — a rogue extension or a bundled installer from other software — not a Chrome bug.

1. Open chrome://extensions and look for anything you don't recognize installing recently — check each one's Details page for its permissions.
2. Remove any extension you didn't intentionally install, especially ones added around the time the hijacking started.
3. Go back to chrome://settings/appearance and chrome://settings/onStartup and reset your homepage and startup pages manually.
4. If it keeps resetting, use Reset settings to their original defaults at chrome://settings/reset — this disables all extensions and clears startup, homepage, and new-tab overrides in one step.
5. On Windows, also check installed programs for anything unfamiliar added recently — some adware bundles a browser hijacker as a separate app, not just an extension.

Quick reference: keeping your setup consistent across devices

If you use Chrome on more than one computer, your homepage and startup pages travel with your Google account automatically — a new-tab extension does not.

Homepage & startup pages

Sync automatically across signed-in devices when Chrome Sync is on for Settings, under chrome://settings/syncSetup.

New tab extensions

Install separately on every desktop device — Chrome Sync doesn't push extensions to devices where they aren't already added, and none of it applies to Android or iOS.

Managed accounts

A work or school account can override sync and force a specific homepage or new tab page regardless of your personal settings.

Guest and Incognito windows

Ignore your custom homepage and most new-tab extensions by design, and always open to Chrome's default new tab page.

For more ways to reshape how Chrome looks day to day, browse the full customization category — it covers themes, cursors, and font tools alongside new-tab dashboards. Every extension linked in this guide has an editorial record built the way we describe in our methodology, and the blog has more Chrome setup guides if this is one of several settings you're changing today.