There are a few various web browsers used to navigate on the internet. However, the most popular one is Google Chrome, partly because everyone knows the Google name and also for the fact that it uses the Google search engine by default, which is the most popular way to find what you are looking for on the web. But one of the things Google Chrome does automatically is keep the pages you visit the most and places them as thumbnails on your home page. Here is how you can change them if you want.
Why do People Use Google Chrome More than Other Web Browsers?
We all prefer to be in familiar territory. This might be even truer on the internet, where security is particularly important for the safety of your computer, but also to protect your private information. Using Google Chrome is comforting because we know that it is an established name that everyone uses around the world. Therefore, it makes it easier to choose than others like Mozilla, Explorer or Safari.
Also, for those who are not particularly internet savvy, Google Chrome is the easy way to go around the internet. Since the home page is automatically the Google search engine, every time someone wants to look for something, they only have to open a new web page and type what they are looking for inside the search box. For those who are constantly on the Web, this may not seem like a big advantage, but for someone who uses it sparsely, it eliminates the risk of getting lost, while trying to find the right information. It is a big advantage for those who weren’t born with the World Wide Web and who are still somewhat afraid of it.
Homepage Thumbnails Are Created by Tracking Your Visits
The reason why there are thumbnails installing themselves on your homepage, showing websites that you have visited in the past, is because Google tracks your internet habits. It does so by keeping the visited websites inside its “History” tab, but it also uses this information to create thumbnails of the ones you have visited the most, recently. This exists to make your life easier, by providing you with a direct link, through a simple click. However, you may not want other people to see your most visited websites, and so you’ll need to find a way to remove these thumbnails from your homepage.
How to Remove Thumbnails from Your Homepage?
If you are worried that you won’t be able to get rid of the thumbnails on your homepage, take a deep breath and relax, this will be so easy that you’ll wonder why you panicked in the first place. First open a new homepage, so you can see the various thumbnails. Select the ones you want to remove and go over them, one by one, with your cursor. When you pass over it, there will be a little “x” appearing on the top right corner. If you click on it, the thumbnail will be removed and won’t come back in the future.
If you want to remove all the thumbnails from the page, there is a way to do it through one simple action. Search for the three dots at the right corner of your screen. Once you found it, click on it. There you will find the “History” tab. Choose that one, and then select “Clear History.” Close your browser and open a new one. This should have gotten rid of all the thumbnails.
What if You Want to Add a Thumbnail to your Homepage?
There are a few ways to go about adding a new thumbnail. If the website you want to add is one that you visit regularly, removing the previous ones should solve the problem, as Google will recognize it as one of the most visited sites and it to your homepage. If that doesn’t work, then you should go into your history, find it there and drag it onto your homepage. This should create a thumbnail of the website, which you’ll be able to access directly by clicking on it.
There is another way to go about getting to a website easily, that has nothing to do with the thumbnails. When you are on that particular page, click on the star at the top right-hand corner. That is how you bookmark a page. Once it is there, you can go inside your bookmark section, every time you open a new web browser and select it, so that it opens automatically.
Modifying, removing and adding elements on Google Chrome is easy. The engineers, who created the browser and keep working on it to make it better, have kept in mind that it needs to be user friendly. Therefore, today, you don’t even have to know how to modify it. Just follow your instinct and chances are it will lead you to the solution. But at least now you know for sure how to add and remove thumbnails from your homepage!
