How to Revert Chrome's New Tab Page

How to Solve It

If you just want to solve this, here you go. If you don't know what the problem is, jump down to Chrome's Bad New Tab Page Update below.

Solution

Visit chrome://flags

Ctrl+F for "Instant"

Set both "Instant..." settings to Disabled

Chrome asks you to Relaunch it. Do so.

Chrome's Bad New Tab Page Update

Chrome used to have a great New Tab page: the top 8 sites you visit appeared every time you'd open a new window or tab, with nice big buttons scaled to whatever size screen you were on. For those of us who used it, rather than having google.com as our homepage - Google appears to have decided we must be mistaken, and has turned the New Tab page into the Google.com homepage. The top 8 sites are now stuffed into a tiny area below - on small screens they end up below the fold, and on large screens they're miniscule compared to their former selves.

There's also no undo/disable/revert clearly visible. But it turns out there is a way to fix it buried in Chrome.