Doodles Coming to the Chrome New Tab Page

The Google homepage is still one of the most if not the most visited page on the web. But it could have been even more popular. These days, most people start a search straight from their browser, either from the unified address box or the dedicated search box, and bypass the homepage altogether.

This enables them to skip a step and get to the results faster. But it also means that many people miss out on the doodle Google keeps on creating, some of them quite interesting, like the mini-game doodles for the London Olympics.

Thankfully, Google is on the case and is working on building doodles into Chrome, as long as you use Google as the search provider. The feature is in the very early stages, but it's past being just a plan, it's definitely getting done.

How it works is by adding the day's doodle to the new tab page in Chrome. This way, you'll be able to check out whatever Google has come up with while still being able to do a search as fast as possible. The feature does eat up some of the space for apps and visited pages though.

Enabling the feature takes a bit of effort and it may not even work on anything besides Chrome OS for now. You can give it a try by launching Chrome with the "--enable-instant-extended-api" flag.

It's certainly an interesting concept and an example of the benefits of having the same company provide the search results and the browser. The downside is that you won't get the same level of support and integration with any other search provider, or with any other browser for that matter. But if Chrome and Google Search are your picks, you won't have anything to complain about.

Via: Doodles Coming to the Chrome New Tab Page