> They've done away with the concept of a homepage and exclusively control what the new tab page looks like. There's no way for users to set a competitor's site

> They've done away with the concept of a homepage and exclusively control what the new tab page looks like. There's no way for users to set a competitor's site as the new tab page Huh? This isn't true at all. There are a ton of new tab page extensions and all the functionality you'd want that's in the default one (like most visited sites) is available through the extension APIs.