Background image in google chrome

Question

Is there a way to set/change a background image in google chrome without(!) installing a theme?

Answer 1

The newtab page is not generated, it is a resource built-into Chrome that is loaded and processed at runtime. It would of course be easier to modify the New Tab page with an extension, but you can edit it to make your changes permanent (ie, built-in, even when running in bare-minimum mode with all plugins and extensions disabled), however you would have to do so again after each update (though this can be made easier in various ways). If you want to go this route, you can find the New Tab page in the file CHROME.DLL.

First close all instances of Chrome/Chromium (make sure that no instances of chrome.exe are present in the Task Manager), then make a backup copy of chrome.dll (ResHacker does this automatically, but you’ll want a spare copy just in case).

Now open chrome.dll in a resource editor such as ResHacker. The page is in the binary (BINDATA) section, under resource 523—the number may change, but search for the string bookmarkbarattached:bookmarkbarattached;. (For some reason, there is no <title>New Page</title> element in the page, it is added at runtime even though it is a static string and has no dynamic content.)

At this point, you can make whatever changes you wish. You can add elements, scripts, styles, etc.

Other than the obvious (editing compiled, binary files and the need to re-edit after updates), one caveat is that you cannot link to local files (which makes sense since the browser is not a web server). The New Tab page is “located” at the URL chrome://newtab/, so any relative URIs will be relative to that). You can of course use absolute URIs such as http://foobar.org/images/blah.jpg or chrome://theme/css/newtab.css.

When you’re done, compile the script (if the resource-editor has such a button) and save it. Now run Chrome and your New Tab page should be shiny and new.

Below, I edited the New Tab page and threw in a picture in the bottom-right corner that toggles between two graphic files when you click on it (it was originally a simple link to my homepage, but I “fancied it up” to show that you can make significant changes to the New Tab page). I also set the style of the body element to a graphic file on my site, so I can easily change it by changing the file instead of re-editing the DLL file. Of course, even easier still would be to simply add an external style sheet to the page so that any changes can be made to a text file without re-editing the DLL file.

Answer 2

Not directly, you can customise using Speed Dial

If you aren’t satisfied with just changing the color of Speed Dial, you can set a background image to really change the look. Any image works, but it currently needs to be hosted online. The developer notes that they will soon be adding support for local background images, so keep an eye out for future updates.

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