Is there a way to stop Google Chrome from showing most visited sites on a blank tab?

Question

Whenever I open a new tab in Google Chrome I see the Google search bar plus 8 thumbnails of recently visited (or most visited) sites. I never click on the thumbnails and find them to be annoying. Is there anyway to disable this in Chrome?

I can think of a hacky workaround like creating a blank page someplace and setting that to be the new tab page, but there must be a better way. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Since nobody answered I thought I would post and answer to my question:

Use the Empty New Tab Page extension for a new blank tab instead of the default new tab.

There are also some redirect extensions such as Momentum, which loads a different full screen image each day.

Answer 2

type chrome://flags then Disable "Top Sites from Site Engagement"