Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand the "New Page" tab. After a while, or if I have a bunch of tabs already open, the New Page tab can take up to a minute to load. I would rather just have a blank tab so I can start typing the URL immediately. Hmm, maybe I should stop whining and write my own extension...
You can always try to clear out the cache. This was causing me lots of trouble with firefox and opening up a new window. I seem to remember there is a faq entry on the chrome site that prescribes this solution for your exact problem.
There's an extension available that opens a blank page in new tabs. I agree with you, Chrome's default new tab page is almost as bad as Safari's 3D top sites thing that opens in new tabs.
Apart from the minimalism I feel that the extension doubles up to hinder procrastination since the list is visible every time you fire up the browser or open a new tab.
I was curious, so I downloaded it and ran unzip -l.
It contains the contents of the .git directory and another copy of the .crx file, inside itself (who knows how many levels this goes down). Actual code (almost entirely jQuery and .psd "source" for the icons) looks to be ~100kb.
Authors, don't do this. git-archive is your friend.
You could as well set your home page to a to-do list page (cookie-stored pwd protected.) I think under the hood, that is approximately what this add-on does.
Teuxdeux looks neat too. However one drawback would be that it wouldn't work without internet access, but the extension would since it stores data locally.
