Nov 262013
Holy crap, not 24 hours after I post my instructions on how to restore the thumbnail on Chrome’s New Tabs Page I see that this has been remedied. I assume this sort of thing takes more than a single day to implement, so obviously they had to have been working on this before I wrote anything. Still, that was a weird feeling.
I’m actually fairly sure that feature was around as early as november 2012 though I’m not 100% sure.