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A few weeks ago, I told you guys that Chrome’s new tab page will soon get custom backgrounds. Today I have something more interesting to add to that. Looks like Chrome’s new tab page will get a feature similar to Chromecast’s wallpapers.

Here is the description of the code change:

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Adds service to get wallpaper collections to display on NTP background. Creates a service that uses SimpleURLLoader to asynchronously request wallpaper collections from the Backdrop service, and makes them available to the Local NTP in a javascript variable.

The “Backdrop”

In the title, I said that this is going to be a service similar to Chromecast’s wallpaper. However, it is possible that Chrome is going to use the same service, not just a “similar” service. I am saying this because of the word, “Backdrop” with an uppercase B in the code description.

Looking at the actual code, that Chrome will use to download wallpapers looks familiar:

// The url to download the proto of the complete list of wallpaper collections.

constexpr char kBackdropCollectionsUrl[] =

“https://clients3.google.com/cast/chromecast/home/wallpaper/”

“collections?rt=b”;

Here is a description of the feature, from the code:

“The Chrome Desktop New Tab Page background selector displays a ”

“rich set of wallpapers for users to choose from. Each wallpaper ”

“belongs to a collection (e.g. Arts, Landscape etc.). The list of ”

“all available collections is obtained from the Backdrop wallpaper ”

“service.”

From the code, it looks like users will have settings (gear) icon on the new tab page which will give options to customize this feature. There might even be an option to pick non-Google services. We already have such a feature in Chromecast backdrops. So, it is safe to assume that we will get similar services on Chrome too.

Stay tuned for more!