Buried in Chrome Canary is a new experimental flag that does something almost embarrassingly basic: it lets you actually, fully hide the bookmarks bar from the New Tab page. Firefox and Safari have offered this exact level of control for well over a decade.
Google is testing it as if it’s new ground.
What the New Flag Actually Changes
Right now, stable Chrome forces the bookmarks bar to appear on the New Tab page even when a person has toggled it off everywhere else in their settings — the exact bug that plagued Chrome 148 users for weeks. The new Canary flag, spotted first by Windows Report, replaces the old blunt on/off toggle with a three-option dropdown: show the bar everywhere, show it only on the New Tab page, or hide it permanently across the board.
Testing confirms the “Always hide” option genuinely works as advertised this time, cleaning up the New Tab interface the way people have been asking for. To try it, anyone on Canary can enable the NTP Simplification Bookmark Bar flag and restart the browser, which swaps in the new dropdown under Appearance settings.
How Firefox and Safari Have Handled This for Years
Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar has offered a granular “Always Show,” “Never Show,” and “Show Only on New Tab” setting through its Library menu since long before Chrome existed in its current form. Safari’s Favorites Bar toggle works the same way — a simple View menu option with no forced states on any particular page. Neither browser has ever had a version where the toolbar overrode a user’s explicit preference on one specific page type, which is precisely the bug Chrome is only now building a real fix for.
The Catch That Undermines the Whole Point
There’s an immediate regression built into the fix: enabling the new flag breaks the classic Ctrl+Shift+B keyboard shortcut entirely. People who are used to toggling the bar on and off with a keystroke lose that ability the moment they opt into the new, more granular control. Google hasn’t given a timeline for fixing that before the feature reaches general availability.
It’s a strange trade to force on anyone: gain a genuinely useful three-way setting, lose a keyboard shortcut that’s worked the same way for years.
Why This Basic Fix Took This Long
The context makes the timing land oddly. Reports connect this round of interface tweaks to Chrome’s broader AI push — the team is reportedly preparing infrastructure for in-browser AI features, and giving people cleaner, more controllable basic layouts before adding more visual complexity on top makes sense as sequencing. But it does mean a fundamental customization option other browsers solved years ago is only arriving now, as a side effect of Chrome trying to make room for something else entirely — the same way plenty of people already share bookmarks online across browsers without waiting on any single vendor’s toolbar settings to catch up.