After Chrome’s version 148 update rolled out on May 5, 2026, a lot of people who keep their bookmarks bar hidden suddenly found it plastered across every new tab page anyway — whether they had bookmarks saved or not.
Nothing they tried made it go away. Not the keyboard shortcut. Not the settings toggle. Not even disabling the relevant Chrome flag directly.
A Bug That Overrode Every Way of Turning It Off
Users compared notes on Reddit and Google’s own support forums, describing a regression that forced the bookmarks bar onto the New Tab page specifically, regardless of what setting they’d chosen. Ctrl+Shift+B, the long-standing universal toggle for this exact feature, simply stopped doing anything. Disabling the underlying flag had no effect either. The bar would only vanish once you actually navigated to a website — a workaround, not a fix.
What made this particularly frustrating for affected users is that the bug wasn’t cosmetic. If your bookmarks bar was empty because you never used it, Chrome still rendered the full-width empty bar on every new tab, which functioned as a constant, unwanted visual reminder of a setting the browser was supposed to respect.
How Long It Took Google to Actually Respond
Google didn’t officially acknowledge the bug for about a week after users started reporting it. Once it did, the company confirmed a regression bug introduced by a specific changelist in Chrome 148, affecting the New Tab Page specifically, and said the team had rolled back the problematic change and requested a merge-back into the release. Notably, the engineer originally assigned to the bug reportedly wasn’t looped in right away, because the notification landed in the wrong internal account — a small detail that says a lot about how a “simple” toggle got stuck broken in production for as long as it did.
The merge-back process itself illustrates something worth understanding about how browser bugs get fixed. Rolling back a change that’s already shipped to millions of users on the stable channel isn’t instant — it has to go through its own review and release cycle, which is part of why a fix that seems trivial in isolation can still take weeks to actually reach affected users.
The Workarounds Say Something About How Fragile Bookmark UI Actually Is
In the meantime, the suggested fixes ranged from installing a third-party new-tab-page extension like Tabliss or Infinity New Tab to override Chrome’s own new tab entirely, to manually consolidating bookmarks into a single folder so the bar at least stayed less cluttered while broken. One of the more common suggestions — downgrading to Chrome 147 — came with its own warning that older versions carry real security risk, which meant the actual choice for a lot of people was “annoying toolbar” versus “known vulnerabilities.”
None of those options are a real fix. They’re a temporary patch on a browser that couldn’t reliably remember a setting most people configured once and never touched again.
What a Bug Like This Reveals About Relying on One Browser’s Bookmark UI
The bug itself was fixed within weeks. But it’s a useful reminder that your bookmarks are entirely at the mercy of whatever a single vendor’s release process gets right or wrong in a given update, if that browser is the only place they live — there’s no fallback if Chrome’s own bookmarks bar stops behaving the way you configured it, unless a bookmark share keeps a working copy somewhere else.
