Doing some quick research reveals that Google makes the chrome new tab page easy to change. Just create an extension, give it an attribute of “newtab”: “newtab.html” (link to documentation) and set it to whatever HTML page you want. You can interact with the bookmarks, recent tabs, etc as well as add in anything else you wan to do.

I typically use 3 browsers for various activities:

• Internet Explorer – for work related activities and testing my personal sites to see how much IE breaks my CSS
• Firefox - personal browsing at home and for developing websites, reading tech blogs at work (the RSS dynamic bookmarks are wonderful)
• Chrome - personal browsing at work (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc)

In Firefox, my home page at at both work and home is my iGoogle page. I get current news updates, slickdeals feeds, weather, and all kinds of other stuff that I miss when I open Chrome. I don’t use it as my home page in Chrome because I really like the new tab page functionality. Big icons let me open the pages I read most often very quickly.

The thought of combining the real-time stream of information with the tab interactions of Chrome leaves me wanting to take the Incredible Start Page, rip it apart (you can find the source for chrome extensions in your local machine), and put it all back together with all the bells and whistles I get in iGoogle.