Chrome New Tab Page Different/Changed. Samsung Tab 3, Android Kitkat Usually my chrome://newtab looks like this:

When I opened chrome recently and made a new tab, it looked like this (PLEASE NOTE! This is an image I took from chrome beta to recreate the image as I cant recreate it on chrome version 36, as after I cleared chromes data in application management,  it was gone.)



I first noticed there was a Google search bar, and tapping just moved it to the top like the beta did. It looked exactly like the beta one, but how did it end up on my normal chrome? I searched the settings and could not find anything. I had just been browsing reddit and superuser, and was on youtube. When I came back to make a new tab it was different.  I cleared the data for chrome and it was gone, so thats why I installed beta and took a screenshot for comparison.  Any explanation?
I believe your installation was selected for the experiment (aka field trial). The Chrome team sometimes rolls experimental features to a limited number of users (like 2% of all installation). Then they gather some statistics to see how this feature performs. The new style of the new tab page seems to be one of those experiments. You can turn it on (and off) via chrome://flags page in your browser (search for enable-new-ntp).