UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3552.2 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Open a new window or tab
2. Enter a URL or click a bookmark

What is the expected behavior?
The tab should have no back history

What went wrong?
The tab can go back to the new tab page, even if I am running an extension such as "blank new tab page"

Did this work before? No 

Chrome version: 71.0.3552.2  Channel: canary
OS Version: OS X 10.13.6
Flash Version: 

This is a feature request.

Basically, if I express a preference for a blank/empty new tab page, the browser should discard that from the back button once I visit a site. This is how Safari and Firefox behave if you set the preference for Blank/Empty Page.

My use case is that a single-page app such as Gmail, or Drive, or Twitter, etc., takes some time to load initially but then can go back/forward very quickly to move between screens. If I accidentally press "back" too many times, then my Gmail page is gone and I'm back at the NTP, and I have to wait to load the page again. There's also nothing interesting on a blank page, so navigating back to it can only lead to disappointment.

I am therefore in the habit of opening links in a new tab pretty much always (e.g. type "mail", then press Option+Return).

In the settings, we already have sections for "on startup" and "show home button". If adding an additional option for "new windows" and "new tabs" is out of the question, then I would suggest that this can be added to the chrome_url_overrides extension API.

With the current extension API, an extension must include an actual HTML file, even if it's just an empty file, as the value for "newtab". Setting this property to "about:blank" leads to an error when loading an extension, so that could work to trigger this behavior.