UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.108 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Open a new tab

What is the expected behavior?
1. The new tab automatically loads the URL that I have previously specified in "Settings". (This could simply be whatever I set as the "Home button" URL, if that makes things easier.)
2. As the new tab opens, the cursor goes into the address bar with the URL selected from start to end, so that if I start typing, whatever I type will overwrite the contents of the address bar, and hitting Enter takes me to the URL typed.

What went wrong?
The new tab loads Chrome's built-in "New Tab page" instead of the custom URL that I'd like it to load.

Did this work before? No 

Chrome version: 63.0.3239.108  Channel: stable
OS Version: 10.0
Flash Version: 

There are hundreds of Chrome extensions that replace the "New Tab page", dozens that simply allow the user to set a custom URL to load. I have used one of the latter ones until now, but one of the latest Chrome updates broke the ability to start typing a URL right away using this extension. I have also tried writing an extension that works the way I described, but it is impossible: the extension can't specify an external URL as the "New Tab page", so all extensions work in a way that they load a static built-in HTML, that quickly redirects the browser to the custom URL. This redirection however results in the focus being taken away from the address bar, and also causes issues whenever Chrome crashes and you'd like to "Restore pages" on a restart.

So TL;DR: Setting a custom URL for new tabs to load is something a lot of people want (thus the many extensions), so I think this should come built-in (especially if Chrome makes it impossible to add this correctly via an extension).