The most visited websites thumbnails are one of the most talked about features of Chrome right from day one. When I say talked about, it includes both positive and negative comments. The team is redoing these thumbnails, the first time after they first launched it.

 If you are among those who did not like this feature, sorry, the most visited websites are not going anywhere. They are just replacing them with favicons of those websites. Here is how it looks like:

This looks more in sync with the Material Design philosophy that Google is following these days. Remember those icons on your Gmail app for Android? Those squares with profile pictures or first letter from the sender’s name?

The commit code says “Working prototype to fetch, store, and display big icons.” If they are planning to use faviocns from websites, I have to go ahead and update mine with a better image! Other than the favicon, I cannot think of any other “big icon” to place there, automatically.

It makes more sense to show icons instead of thumbnails actually. (Well, it took 6+ years for me to realize this?) We  relate more to the logos of the websites that we visit, than their thumbnails. Do you agree?

This is currently a work in progress feature. You can manually add a switch (–force-field-trials=IconNTP/Enabled/) to try this. I would wait for this to show up as a flag in chrome://flags page though. Until then, use the comment form below to share your thoughts on this change and discuss it with others.

via François Beaufort.