But Google decided that's not actually what you wanted to do and removed that feature.

Funnily enough the blank page extension was made by a Chrome developer, so I assume there were some team internal tensions and those who wanted to keep that feature were overridden..

And Google is probably right - for most people, if all of a sudden their new tab page was just a blank screen they'd assume something was broken. It was pretty easy to change that setting without knowing what it meant.

Installing an extension is a much more obvious process - it has a description and screenshots showing exactly what it does, so nobody should be surprised.

Both chrome and Firefox have been shifting to moving any behaviour that could appear as "broken" out of their settings and into extensions. I wouldn't assume tension in the team because a chrome Dev built the extension, more likely just normal process.

It's not "all of a sudden" though, is it? You would have to explicitly set new tabs to show about:blank for that to happen.

That's really sad. It works in FireFox!

Don't you worry -- Mozilla isn't immune from this. They removed this feature on Firefox for iOS which is super annoying. You can type in new tab page but it's not allowed to be about:blank.

Yay installing an empty HTML page on my server just to have basic functionality.

That's odd, it works in Fennec for Android. I wonder if it's a side effect of iOS not actually using Firefox's rendering engine.

I mean, they could surely work around that right? Use something like an empty data:text/html page instead of about:blank if there really is some sort of iOS restriction.