Just what I was looking for, opens the page I want with no text in the address bar and the address bar correctly focused so you can just start typing.

After trying a few comparable extensions out there, I'm staying with that one!
1. Opensource
2. Focus on address bar after loading
3. no need to remove homepage URL before starting to type

Overall the best!

Now this is great! A real replacement for New Tab by Leigh Brenecki (last commit 5 years ago).

This fork (updated 3 weeks ago) has been updated to fix the URL being populated upon new tab loads.

Works as intended now. Great one!