How to edit Chrome thumbnails

Morten Bock — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:52:25 +0100

I just wanted to shared this tip, if anyone else wants a bit of control over the thumbnails that show up in the "New tab" page of Chrome.

For me, it was annoying that it had saved the http://twitter.com/ url, because the front page has the stupid login box where you have to get your mouse going. Instead, I want it to go to http://twitter.com/home which has a much better login box.

This is not supported by chrome, as far as I can tell, so I went digging. And I found a small file that contains the tabs. In my case (On XP in danish) it is here:

C:\Documents and Settings\Morten Bock Sørensen\Lokale indstillinger\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

UPDATE:
I now upgraded to Windows 7, and here the file is found in:
C:\Users\Morten Bock Sørensen\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

Open it with your favorite text editor, and look near the bottom. There is a list of "pinned_urls" in what looks like Json to me. I just changed the link I needed from:

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {

"direction": "ltr",

"index": 2,

"title": "Twitter / Home",

"url": "http://twitter.com/home"

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {
"direction": "ltr",
"index": 2,
"title": "Twitter / Home",
"url": "http://twitter.com/"
},

"1cc089548931c4fe0463e7a98ec6078e": {
"direction": "ltr",
"index": 2,
"title": "Twitter / Home",
"url": "http://twitter.com/home"
},

And off we go :-)

Just remember to do this while Chrome is closed, otherwise it will overwrite your changes.