What is a new-tab-page-third-party in chrome?

Question

I recently opened my chrome browser after a crash and found the following displayed when I created a new tab

Looks suspicious, what does it mean exactly? I'm currently running Chrome 91.0.4472.77

Answer 1

Looks legitimate

https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/52c4e0d606a975dc5c1315422fb31db9e4406782/chrome/common/webui_url_constants.cc#L130-L132

Here's the commit from 3months back that introduced this UI for the New Tab Page (NTP)

This CL creates a new default NTP for third-party search providers that do not have their own NTP define. It shows the most-visited tiles centered on the screen and can display a background is a chrome theme extension is installed. https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commit/dc334612cb78fa2233eb34c1355b6ee905f57cdc

Answer 2

One advantage to the new-tab-page-third-party UI (intentional or un-) is, because it's search-engine driven it can act as a canary for search hijacking.

I recently worked on a system that previously had a bundled McAfee antivirus suite installed. Even after removal, it left a search hijacker behind that kept resetting Chrome's default search engine to their Yahoo!-based "Secure Search". The fact that the non-Google-branded new tab page kept coming up was the red flag that clued me in to the search modifications.

Answer 3

It also appears to occur if you have modified the browser's user-agent string (e.g., with a chrome extension like Chrome UA Spoofer). While the UA string is set to anything other than the Chrome default, new windows and tabs have the URL chrome://new-tab-page-third-party/.