I’ve recently switched to Google Chrome on my Windows 8 PC and can’t figure out how to set the home page to something other than a Google search page. Help!
While it’s generally easy for you to change the default opening home page on a Web browser, there are two things working against you here: First, there are also a lot of programs that seem to sneakily change your home page to their site or their own search engine with their adverts, etc, and second you’re also having to deal with the often confusing experience that is Windows 8.
Now that isn’t to say that every application in Windows 8 is confusing, but after years of everyone getting used to the menu bar at the top of app windows with File, Edit, Help, etc, it can be a bit daunting to figure out where things are.
Fortunately, the Chrome development team has your back because everything you need is tucked into the drop-down menu behind a single button on the browser’s window.
To demonstrate the sequence, I’m going to show you how to set the home page of this site, AskDaveTaylor, as your Chrome browser’s home page.
First off, here’s the home page:
Can you see the settings and controls button?
Yeah, neither can most people. Turns out it’s the set of the horizontal lines to the right of the address bar. Let’s look just a bit closer to see:
There it is, immediately under the red “x” button.
Click on it and a menu with lots of interesting options appears:
Got a few minutes? Try “Relaunch Chrome in Windows 8 Mode”. Pretty radical.
Let’s stay on task, however, and to do that you’ll want to choose “Settings”, as shown.
The result:
Here you can see the three options for what Chrome should do when you start it up: open a blank page, open the last page you visited prior to quitting the browser last time, or open a specific page or set of pages.
The latter’s the one you seek, so click on “Set pages”…
Notice the button on the lower left: “Use current pages”. That’s the one (since you’re already on the site you want to use as your new home page, in this instance https://www.askdavetaylor.com/
Click on “Use current pages” and it’ll confirm:
That’s it. Now if you’d like to add additional pages or tabs that should open automatically, you can do that here too with the “Add a new page” section.
Easy enough once you know where things are hiding.
The only way I found to do this was to use an extension called ‘New Tab Behaviour’. Once installed everything should be self explanatory from then. However, I can’t believe Google developers couldn’t have done this for us – it has been in IE for as long as I can remember.
I’ve got the home page changed – thank you very much.
I’m using Chrome by the way.
Now I want very much to change the new tab page away from Rogoform back to Google.
I’m tried every thing I can think of.
Tom
I am buying you a cup of coffee. Or, even better I can send you a choice of any product on my site for free.