I recently opened my chrome browser after a crash and found the following displayed when I created a new tab
Looks suspicious, what does it mean exactly? I'm currently running Chrome 91.0.4472.77
2 Answers
Looks legitimate
Here's the commit from 3months back that introduced this UI for the New Tab Page (NTP)
This CL creates a new default NTP for third-party search providers that do not have their own NTP define. It shows the most-visited tiles centered on the screen and can display a background is a chrome theme extension is installed.
One advantage to the new-tab-page-third-party UI (intentional or un-) is, because it's search-engine driven it can act as a canary for search hijacking.
I recently worked on a system that previously had a bundled McAfee antivirus suite installed. Even after removal, it left a search hijacker behind that kept resetting Chrome's default search engine to their Yahoo!-based "Secure Search". The fact that the non-Google-branded new tab page kept coming up was the red flag that clued me in to the search modifications.
