Dear Maintainer,

With chromium 154.0.8037.92-1, when DuckDuckGo is selected as the
default search engine, the New Tab page has a Customize button with a
toggle to show Most-visited sites.  I find this feature convenient and
have had it enabled in my profile.  With chromium 156.0.8078.47-1 and
156.0.8078.73-1, the Most-visited sites section disappeared and there
is no Customize button, only "AI Settings".  The issue is demonstrated
in the attached screenshots.  Note that the Most-visited sites section
is present when Brave or Ecosia or other browsers are selected as the
default, just not DuckDuckGo.

I suspect this is related to the change in version 155.0.8059.39-1
described in NEWS.Debian.gz.  Would it be possible to restore the
option to enable Most-visited sites for DuckDuckGo?

Thanks for maintaining Chromium in Debian,
Kevin

Hi Kevin,

I looked into this, and tracked down the issue to an edit in
search-engines.patch, i.e.

https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/blob/master/debian/patches/debianization/search-engines.patch

Specifically, this one:

    -   "new_tab_url": "https://duckduckgo.com/chrome_newtab",
    +   "new_tab_url": "https://start.duckduckgo.com/",

We made this change because the original URL results in an obtrusive
prompt as the very first thing you see in a new profile. I have
experimentally reverted this edit in a build of 156.0.8078.73-1, and
attached a screenshot of the prompt.

If you click that prompt away, the "Customize" button on the page yields
a "Most-visited sites" option.

Could you try setting the above chrome_newtab URL as your home page, and
see if that restores the missing option for you?