"paste this in Chrome's address bar: chrome://flags/, use Ctrl+F to search for "Enable Instant Extended API" and click" Disable

Although it only appears to be enabled on non-Linux platforms

Thank you SO much - I've been using fewer and fewer Google services, and the address box already does search so I don't need another bar, so I was really annoyed at these changes.

That said, I spent the evening trying to figure out how to fix Firefox's new tab page (half the thumbnails aren't there because Firefox doesn't store them for https:// sites to protect my privacy) - if you go into the thumbnails subdirectory of the Firefox profile directory, the files there are named using the MD5 hash of the URL of the page - just put a PNG in of the appropriate size and you can customize the blank thumbnails to your liking.