Chrome has been the browser of my choice for quite some time now. But starting with version 29.x the startpage (when opening a new tab) changed quite a bit – instead of showing my apps, the page would show the omni-searchbox.

This would not be that bad, but I was missing my other devices tab quite badly.

Even more strange was the fact, that on some devices the startpage would show the omni-searchbox while other devices would show the “classic” startpage – all devices are running the same version of Chrome on Windows 7 or Window 8 or Windows Server 2012. Strange.

So after a while I figured: it’s in the settings. Obviously some version of Chrome would change the default setting. If I would skip a version on upgrade this setting would not be changed and thus lead to different behavior on different devices, depending on the upgrade-path I took.

So to get back a consistend look-and-feel I just changed chrome://flags/#enable-instant-extended-api to disabled on all browsers and I got me used look-and-feel.