14 DAY TRIAL // One of the big new features in Google Chrome 15, now in the beta channel, is the revamped New Tab Page. The slick new tab page brings Chrome into 2011 with its big buttons, touch optimized UI and beautiful graphics.
Too bad though that, apart from looking good, the redesigned new tab page brings little of value over the version it's replacing, while it actually makes quite a few things harder to do.
People have criticised Google's design ideas, which seemed questionable in some cases, but there are far fewer people running the dev and beta channel versions of Chrome than the ones using the stable version. And they expect things to be somewhat broken as well.
Thankfully though, Google has been listening to the (negative) feedback and is making some changes and tweaks to the redesigned new tab page, which still hasn't been finalized.
The big change that you'll notice is that the bookmarks bar has been brought back, making it easy once again to access the most important bookmarks regardless of what section of the new tab page you're on.
In fact, the entire Bookmarks section has been removed altogether, leaving only the Most Visited and Apps sections.
That said, the bookmarks bar is plucked straight out of the old new tab page, version 3 if you're counting, so it looks rather out of place. It's not an easy-on-the-eyes solution, but most users probably aren't going to complain.
At least it's a sign that Google is listening. What's more, Google could be working on further retweaking the design and maybe updating the bookmarks bar to the style of the fourth new tab page version.
That would be a best of both worlds solution since most people would agree that the redesigned new tab page is a looker and that the older one was in real need of a visual update.